Riders on the Storm: A SHIELD Codex Halloween
by KhamanV
Summary: Loki and Doctor Strange are forced to work together to hunt what they discover is a cannibal - and maybe a killer. To pass the time, they share a couple of similarly horrible stories from their pasts, from a bleak ER encounter to Loki's first real battle with the demons and the flames of Muspelheim.
1. Good Omens

(This fic will contain medical horror, autopsies, some strong language, a potentially gory tale of fantasy war, and is more of an homage to slasher/thriller Halloween films than previously themed stories. While most of these events will not be detailed in an overly grotesque way, they're still, well, gross in their own right.)

 **Riders on the Storm: A SHIELD Codex Halloween**

 _This is the strangest life I've ever known ~ Jim Morrison, Waiting for the Sun_

 _. . ._

1\. Good Omens

. . .

"I want you to know that this was not exactly my idea." Loki didn't look at his passenger when he finally spoke. He kept his eyes forward, both hands on the wheel. His knuckles were white, but not because of the full four lanes of jacked-up traffic ahead of him on the westbound freeway. No, not because of that.

"No, but the car certainly was," replied Stephen Strange. He also looked straight ahead. His gloved hands were folded with deceptive solemnity on his lap. Both men knew their other option was going to be attempted strangulation.

" _You_ rented it." Under his palms, the plasticky but real leather of the Lexus's wheel began to buckle slightly. The vehicle was a welcome upgrade from the standard SHIELD-approved sedan, but still. Loki had been forced to accept Strange's handling of the matter with grudging politeness. At least while they were still in the rental office, the young male clerk watching them both with enough nervousness to say he could practically smell the tense energy building between the pair of black-suited sorcerers. Now, one long hour on the road behind them spent in freezing silence, Loki was already fed up with this particular layer of the situation. "Aren't you supposed to have a vow of poverty these days or something?"

"Aren't _you_ supposed to be able to warp the dimensional light transcendent?"

 _Squeak_ , went the grey leather wheel. "I like driving."

"Oh, yes, Loki, I can tell." Strange unfolded his hands and reached for the console. "You've been breathing galactic obscenities at every car ahead of us for the last twenty minutes. You're having the time of your life."

"If you touch my phone, we are going to have a problem."

"If you're going to make me listen to _The Best of Queen_ for another two hours, we will have a _worse one_."

 _Creeeeeeak._ "Fine. Pick something else. But I warn you, with full knowledge of exactly how tactless this threat is to you specifically, I am capable of crashing this car so that only you suffer."

"Not in this traffic jam, you're not." Strange snorted, scrolling through Loki's playlists and debating adding commentary to the odd array of musical choices available. He found a folder of Mozart, however, and decided that was safe enough to prevent mutually assured destruction. A moment later, the soft strains of _Don Giovanni_ began to fill the car. "I read the case file."

"Oh good, so you did the absolute bare minimum of preparation necessary before meeting me. Very solid of you. I appreciate it."

Doctor Strange began to inhale, slowly, attempting to use it to focus and center himself before responding. Then the inhale continued, exasperated, until his entire chest was full and tight with air. He let it all back out before he considered another word. "All right. Was there not literally _anyone else_ who could have done this with you?"

"Agent Simmons is our other qualified medical expert, and she's off on some well-earned solitude with Agent Fitz. I could have borrowed a van and filled the back of it with half a dozen younger agents of varying but dimly relevant specialities and spent the matter herding cats to the tune of a migraine dense enough to be picked up on satellites as a black hole, but I was forced to agree with Coulson's suggestion that, being that you're on the damned charter of my damned division, it would be more _efficient_ to put up with you."

Loki followed it up with one more good squeak of the steering wheel, abruptly jockeying two lanes over in the faint hope that he might actually get into the merging lane that waited a mile ahead sometime this century. "Damn me, right?"

"Right." The internal temperature of the car dropped another three degrees. Strange ignored it and reached into the back seat for his tablet. "It's an autopsy, Loki. SHIELD probably has five hundred contracted civilian medical examiners on contact across the globe."

"And most of them aren't qualified for the other specialities I need. You show them anything stranger than a double set of organs and a gunshot wound the victim walked away from and these coroners wind up in SHIELD mandated therapy for a year. It's exhausting. I hate dealing with these people. You'd think they'd be hardier for all they've seen."

"You're already a sorcerer. Do the rest yourself."

"There is an operations protocol that I actually agree with that suggests having multiple viewpoints on a situation is beneficial. You're on call, Strange. You signed the paperwork, because, and I paraphrase your own signing statement, you _also_ believed it might be beneficial to SHIELD to have a department trained and capable of handling supernatural and paranormal matters."

"Damn me, right?" muttered Doctor Strange, staring straight ahead again.

"Right." Loki jumped the car over one more lane with a jerk of the wheel and a snarl under his breath when the smallest opening revealed itself, ignoring the way Strange's gloved fingers reached up to dig hard into the dashboard. The tablet threatened to slide off Strange's lap and under the seat. He caught it with his knees. "If I were less responsible, I'd just levitate the godsdamned car. The turnoff is _right there_."

"For once in my life, I almost wish you were. This traffic is absolutely unnatural, and I knew Jersey pretty damned well to judge unnatural." Strange let go of the dash and picked up the tablet again. "All right. What's not in the open case file? Because what I was given indicated a fairly normal corpse is waiting for a good prodding. Why did it get tagged to you?"

"The medical case is seemingly mundane, correct. What I wasn't authorized to hand over until your foolish arse got into a car with me is the incident file created after the Winnipeg police were called to the scene at the medical examiner's request." Watching the traffic to be certain he was indeed as firmly stuck in a new lane of congestion as he was, Loki reached over to take the tablet from Strange. A moment later he found the password entry and unlocked the rest of the correlating files. Then he handed it back. "Just to help make it clear, the corpse was already thoroughly a corpse by that point. It was something else."

Strange looked at the profile of Loki's face, taking in the weary tone. "I assume the primary side effect of this new divisional sack of problems of yours is you never get to do anything normal anymore."

"No." Loki snorted. "To be fair all it really does is it formalizes that fact. I'm told that before Coulson forged his own little team a few years back, Agent May was happily doing desk work and was somewhat resentful of being pulled out of her time of quiet. And Gods help me, I'm starting to _understand_." He glanced at Strange, droll. "I used to complain if things were boring. Rather a lot."

"The Gods curse us best by giving us what we desire." Strange flipped to the new files to start reading.

"Oh yes, they do." Loki slumped further in the driver's seat, watching someone's hazard lights go on in the lane just ahead of him. "Rat bastards, the lot of them."

. . .

Doctor Strange spent almost a full hour in silence as he worked and reworked his way through the SHIELD file, looking up once in mild astonishment as the traffic began to open up on the way from Chicago to a North Dakota border crossing. Why they were not flying - much less teleporting - was a vague mystery to them both, wrapped in some sort of mealy-mouthish directive from the accounting department of the agency about this method being less expensive.

Strange had a clear suspicion that the real answer was Coulson thought forcing this tragic scenario would be funnier and wanted to listen to Loki complain dramatically for about a week when they were done. Regardless. "I'm on my fourth reread. Let me get this straight. Winnipeg police received a call on a corpse in a residence, no current incident in progress. They go over, do their thing, pick up this poor stiff, name of Jackson, and off he goes to the queue for the CME, where he sits in his little steel box and plastic bag and he waits for something more than a preliminary examination."

"For over three weeks. Winnipeg is having another hot streak, according to local law enforcement. We checked. They were not in a hurry to get to this particular fellow if no one was going to scream for his justice or suchlike."

"I did a brief stretch in Camden a long time ago, on an ER rotation. We made some dark jokes about the bad parts of Winnipeg back then. All right. Finally the examiner's assistant pulls him out of his box and puts him on the slab. Then, according to this, he remembered his date with a burger, leaves the corpse, and goes off for lunch. It happens. One lunch a shift, you do what you need to do." Strange scrolled down, collating his thoughts. "And then he gets back."

"And all hell breaks loose."

"And ye verily, all hell breaks loose. Witness report from the assistant says there was somehow someone else in the autopsy lab, and he wasn't up to the first usual guess. Witness report says…" Strange trailed off. Some things still threw him for a loop. "Report says the intruder was _eating_."

"Yeah." The single human word, normally out of character for Loki, seemed oddly and perfectly weighted this time.

"Eating, what in merry hell, and not only that, witness states the fellow had brought in with him one of those little kitchen scales and seems to have weighed off what he ate. Didn't just nosh down, he neatly sliced off a bit like Hannibal Lecter moonlighting in a deli."

"Yeah."

"And this intruder somehow tears off, uncaught, with his freshly thin-sliced long pig and the scale and this poor assistant who's no doubt already seen a few things in his life is now probably pissing himself, and then-" Strange shook his head.

"Mmhmm." Loki was slumped comfortably in the driver's seat, one hand guiding the Lexus down a quiet rural road.

"The attendant reports on a light show over the body."

" _Mmmhmmm_."

Strange inhaled, held it, let it go. "I'm starting to understand why I got called."

"Welcome to my entire new life." Loki reached over to knuckle at the tablet. "Guess what?"

"I don't want to."

"They have footage of the whole thing, _including_ the phenomena. Assistant left the camera running when he went to grab his lunch."

"Oh, gods."

"They wouldn't release it to us when we got wind of the incident. Said they didn't want to upload it to our servers and then find it on Youtube tomorrow which, let's be honest, if the video shows half of what's in the report, I know at least three people under Coulson's roof that would wrestle with themselves for a week before they leaked it to one of those awful 'science' shows for a laugh."

"One of them is that Miss Johnson."

"She'd at least scrub the data trace and look perfectly innocent for the internal investigation that would arise. In any case, now I need a _specialized_ autopsy from you to compare what was found by the police and what we've got now, and see if there's any trace of the potentially paranormal effect on the corpse, and then the two of us can aggravate the unusual footage out of them in person."

"Well, if there's one thing we can probably accomplish together, it's making everyone else in a fifty foot radius loathe the utter hell out of us both enough to get us what we want just to make us go away."

Loki took that in, then echoed Strange's earlier thought. "You know this is all Coulson's fault somehow."

"I'm not convinced they're not following us with a drone for a laugh."

The car filled with dramatic silence as they both considered that. "I don't sense one," said Loki, finally.

"Me either."

"Might be a satellite was retasked."

Strange inhaled, trying to make peace with the situation. "We can spend this job being angry and paranoid, or we can get it over quickly with with a fraction of professionalism."

"I can be angry and paranoid for _decades_ , Strange. This isn't a boast or a threat, this is a plain and well-tested _fact_."

"Do you want to be stuck with me in a car hunting some ghost-summoning cannibal or whatever the black hell is waiting for us for those decades?"

Loki sighed. "Obviously not. I'm just arguing for the sake of it."

"Some people have actual hobbies, Loki. Could you try origami instead?"

Loki glanced over to read useful details on a sign guiding him towards another freeway he needed, changing lanes. "No. What's your first thought on the light phenomena?"

"Without more detail than 'weird floaty thing about a corpse' I'm at a loss." Strange gestured vaguely at the tablet still in his hands. "It… could be some sort of soul gleam, yes. Could be some localized atmospheric change. Could be a haunt or an imp summon. Could have even been a chemical reaction from the corpse, or a glint of something on the camera lens. There's a big list, and not all of it is immediately supernatural."

"I'm going to be very annoyed if this turns out to be another stupid dog chase, but then again, sometimes I say that, it turns out _not_ to be, and then I regret it."

Strange sat quietly in his seat for a minute, trying to figure out of that really was a vague crack on Scooby Doo that he'd heard, then decided it had to have been. "Pretty sure this won't be over a demon book this time." He _felt_ the hard glance that came his way. "True, we don't know yet. But I doubt it."

"If it is, I'm going to throw myself off a cliff."

Strange decided he wasn't going to say the first thing that came to mind.

. . .

Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, on a grey autumn afternoon. A sprinkle was in the air, not enough to make the roads dangerously wet, but enough to leave dewdrop gleams on the shoulders of dark suits and jackets. The air had a hard chill in it, and brown leaves stuck to the surfaces of cars and empty newspaper boxes like tossed paper bags. The skyline was a mix of new steel and forgotten concrete, all the neon and bright lights still fading into something shadowed and cold.

No one stopped to look at the intruders as they stepped onto William Avenue, the rental locked away safely in the parking garage. Loki glanced down at the privately acquired directions on his phone, knowing hospitals seldom put the morgue on their public maps. It let the living pretend that houses of healing weren't also the places of the dead, among other reasons. He had no time for that sort of illusion, and immediately found where the cold storage was going to be. He gestured for Strange to follow him, ignoring the startled mutter of a security guard the moment he stepped off the beaten track with the flash of an official looking badge and the power of a well-made suit.

The morgue was kept behind an elevator with only a button indicating a secure floor below, and another guard station with a large and locked door where simple arrogance wasn't enough. Passing that hurdle took a few brusque words, a phone call, and summoning the pinched face of the current attendant, who hadn't been warned in advance of their arrival.

Which had been all to Loki's plan. That said, the encounter left him with the question of how the hungry intruder had gotten into the morgue - much less depart it.

Now he settled on a cold stool in the corner of the morgue, watching as the quiet young attendant helped Strange load the corpse in question onto the table with hands that shook slightly. He noted the camera, set high in a corner of the room behind the glass protector that also guarded the door, then looked back at the young man when he spoke. "D-do you need any further assistance?"

Strange glanced at Loki, unamused. His usual gloves were already gone in favor of a lightly powdered set of latex ones. Thin enough, Loki could see the old scars underneath that marked the sorcerer's own changed life. He thought the matter mostly irrelevant here - the corpse wasn't going to get any deader if a knife edge slipped a mite out of true. "I expect we've got this, young man."

"All right. I'll, uh…"

"You can call and tell the ME we'll be visiting his office next. He might appreciate the warning we didn't bother to give you." Loki shifted his weight on the low stool, watching as the bag was unzipped.

"Ah. Er. Right." The attendant vanished with remarkable speed.

"Was it the lightly mutilated corpse that had that effect on him or was it your own soothing presence?" Strange didn't look at Loki as he picked up the chart to start noting comparisons.

"I like to think I exude a kind of natural charm."

"We all have our little fantasies." Strange set the chart back down without reacting to the irritated noise Loki made and frowned at the torso with its unusual and tiny slice high along the left side. "Brent Jackson. Age, 67. Official cause of death is myocardial infarction, time of death guessed to have been around 72 hours before discovery, which is the most half-assed guess I've seen on a chart in a while. Almost takes me back. State of the corpse doesn't justify that at all. I checked the weather before I came down here, Winnipeg's been rather warm but not quite enough to rate running the AC at all hours if you're on the dole. This fellow would have been roasting slowly, but the body doesn't show the signs of longer term decomp. So I'm going to softball, reminding us both I'm not a coroner, much less even a diener, and say he was dead maybe a day before the police came to pick him up. At most."

Strange picked up a pair of forceps and studied the preparatory marks on the body. The full autopsy hadn't been completed after the 'incident,' leaving them with only the prelim. If he wanted to be sure the cause of death was correct, he was going to have to do his own work.

Or drag in the CME. He considered it, but then waggled the forceps in his hand, feeling the distant ache in his finger joints. Corpse or no, this was still going to be _work_. He missed that, sometimes.

"You know, you could use sorcery to do the fiddly bits."

"It's habit. Sometimes I like habit." Strange wrinkled his nose, admitting the obvious. "Also I can't mangle a dead man overmuch."

"Thought the same."

"You know, it would be a _huge_ favor to me if you'd go and eat a sandwich or something for about three hours while I do this." The stool creaked, but there was no other movement from Loki. "It'd also make the work go faster."

"I thought as a fellow sorcerer you'd be a master of mental focus, and here you are letting little old me distract you."

Strange took a long, deep inhale, and got his nostrils full of fresh corpse for his trouble. He put the tools down and pressed both palms against the edge of the cold slab, and he didn't say a single word.

Another creak. "I'll bring back a coffee for you," Strange heard Loki say, obnoxiously cheerful as he sailed towards the door. With all his heart, Strange wished the man would crack the tender part of his elbow on the corner of something sharp while he was gone.

. . .

Doctor Strange didn't look up when Loki returned, only dimly noticing the nostalgic smell of five hour old hospital cafeteria coffee and the crunch of a kettle chip inside a crinkly bag. He kept staring at the body, and the notes he'd made. The weak styrofoam cup appeared by his hand. He didn't pick it up.

Loki's voice filtered into his ear from close by, conversational. "There's an interesting planet about two systems over from the Kree homeworld. They're barely up into local system spaceflight so no one bothers them much yet, but they have an interesting interpretation of sky burial. Very tall trees, they have. Non-carbon based biosphere, so the degradation process is remarkably different than most of ours. Silt-like decomposition. Like ash fields. Very lush world, actually, if paradoxically soft crystalline structures can be considered lush."

"Why bring that up?" Strange glanced up, saw the distant look on Loki's face as he finished off his tiny bag of potato chips.

"Because I'm in a morgue and I've already seen enough dead human bodies in my lifetime to be generally bored with the process. Have you found anything notable?"

"There's nothing boring about the process." Strange looked down at his notes again, freshly annoyed with him.

"You're human. You have a bias."

"There's 21 grams missing when compared with the preliminary report, presumably from the slices made by your unusual intruder. Thin, small slices. Even less than you'd get from a high end charcuterie variety plate. I suppose I'm off _jamón Ibérico_ again. I keep forgetting I'm trying to be mostly vegetarian these days. Put a good meat and cheese plate in front of me and I leap off the wagon. Moments like this remind me why I clamber back on." Strange looked up at Loki's blank face. "The amount is notable. I found nothing else besides that, magically or medically. Cause of death was likely his heart, although that's not my department. Spiritually, his life force has been gone for just over three weeks, confirming my guess. But nobody wants that on a morgue chart."

"Our intruder wasn't too terribly hungry?"

"There's an old, widely discredited tale that the human soul weighs precisely 21 grams. Medically discredited, and of course all my study at Kamar-Taj and elsewhere has thus far backed that up. The soul is not quantifiable by mortal means. The idea persists, nonetheless. And our intruder, being as he was so specific about it, is clearly aware of that belief." Strange gestured at the small but deep wound. "Good cut of flesh there. Never nicked the bone."

Loki was quiet for a moment, taking that in with a return to businesslike consideration. "If it's discredited, why bother to do it?"

Strange answered with a small shake of his head, snapping off his latex gloves and flexing his aching hands. Then he picked up his coffee."Where's the medical examiner's office from here?"

"Up the main road, closer to the river. Could walk it." "I want fresh air. I need to think." The coffee was terrible. Strange almost liked it anyway. 21 grams of raw human flesh, taken and eaten. The over-roasted flavor of the beans suddenly turned to acid in his mouth.

The question hung in the air - _why_? Strange didn't ask it aloud as Loki led him out, it was obvious he was working on the same problem. The man's argumentative behavior had gone away, at least for now. It was time to work in earnest.


	2. Hot Zone

2\. Hot Zone

. . .

Loki looked between the two men waiting for them at the office of the chief medical examiner, the depths of his total lack of amusement completely hidden under his calm facade. It must have chilled his aura or something, however, as he caught Strange give him a quick, taken-aback sort of look before regarding the tableau of their new problem. The man in the chair had his palms pressed neatly together atop the thin desk after the clerk showed the sorcerers in, and dark eyes studied him right back behind thick black-rimmed glasses. Loki slid into a chair elegantly, as if the hostility in the air wasn't a physical, fifth presence. "Doctor Laghari."

"Agent Locke, was it? My assistant at the hospital wasn't certain, and I didn't know how to contact your… agency." Laghari spoke with a trace of local Manitoba accent, drawing some of his vowels out. He smiled, thin and brittle. "I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of asking Superintendent McRae to join us."

Loki didn't look at the cop again. He'd seen what he needed. A thick-necked and humorless looking fellow in an ill-fitting but well-medaled uniform, the exact sort of mundane bureaucratic roadblock he despised. "Of course," he said instead, smooth and frictionless. He pulled his credentials from his suit pocket and tossed them to the cop, still without looking. "There's a card with contact information next to the badge, you're welcome to run this visit by my superiors. I can wait, naturally."

Broad fingers worked their way over the thin leather case, naturally grimy fingernails and scabby knuckles and the thin-eyed arrogant assurance that he was the one in charge here. Yes, Loki could see _plenty_ to annoy him about this particular human. The contact card was scraped out and inspected as if it were a dummy dollar bill.

Loki wanted to utter a dour laugh at the irony. The only things that were fake here was the human-style name - and the man's silent insistence on his own power. "We've just finished our business at the morgue. If we can close matters here, we can move on neatly with our end of the investigation." He left the implication unsaid - the quickest way to get him and Strange gone was to comply. Any other reaction, Loki instantly decided he was going to become _difficult_.

He had the sense Strange, for all their mutual dislike of each other, would roll with it. Neither of them suffered fools. But making those fools' lives hell, now _that_ could be fun.

"I don't think that'll be necessary, Agent." McRae's voice was one of those boomers, a barrel-voice that rumbled out of the stout chest to give him an extra veneer of that puffed up authority. "We've got the problem in hand."

"Oh, do you?" Centuries of control made the question sound airy and interested instead of showing off the raw sarcasm boiling just underneath the words. Hel, maybe they did have it in hand. He reached out to retrieve his credentials from the cop, pinching them neatly between two fingers as if he would have preferred to dry clean them before he put them away again. "I'd very much like to understand."

"We've got a near-positive ID on the intruder at the morgue. Checkpoints outside the city based on some witness reports. We're gonna have him caught within a couple of hours. I don't think we need you gentlemen from SHIELD to be involved any further." McRae sniffed, satisfied.

Loki smiled back, broad and cheery and pretending not to notice tone. _You gentlemen_. Right. "That's excellent news, although we were investigating a particular peculiar angle of the matter regardless, and with cooperation from local authorities arranged beforehand. I believe that cooperation was cleared with your own superior, Superintendent McRae. There's still the matter of certain details during the incident at the morgue, and should you acquire this person, we'd like to observe his questioning."

"Well, we've been discussing the matter of your cooperation, and to be frank, sir, we just don't feel you're going to be able to add much. It'd be a bigger help if you stayed out of the way."

To the man's credit, at least they all weren't going to faff around with pretending to be polite for long. Loki lounged back in the seat, his hands resting comfortably on the cold steel armrests. He didn't say anything immediately, he just studied the human and ran through his mental options. The correct and by the book routine from here would be to politely fob off the cop and send the problem up the line. SHIELD had desk riders whose speciality was the slow destruction of such local obstacles.

Regardless, Loki _hated_ routine on principle. He inhaled, ready with a pointed monologue that would tear apart the man's arrogance, explain their own credentials, get across how, when compared with the morgue incident, it was deeply unlikely they were going to catch this man that easily, all the while sneaking in at least three subtle potshots about just how little Loki thought of the human.

Doctor Strange shifted, then leaned forward to regard the medical examiner with a fixated look. Then, as Loki maintained a straight face, he began to vocally barrel over the other doctor before Loki could get his own mouth open. "SHIELD cooperates not only with the CDC of the United States but with the Public Health Agency here. As a medical liaison with the organization, I'm familiar with the structures of this cooperation. Now, my question to you, Doctor Laghari, is have _you_ cooperated with the PHAC in this matter? Have you been in contact with the micro lab over the incident in the morgue?" He didn't wait for an answer, seeing what he needed on the doctor's suddenly pinched face. "My god, man, they're literally across the street from the incident! You didn't even open an examination with them to ensure there was no contamination vector from the protein consumption, much less any pathogen issue that might be the cause of whatever - _since we don't know_ \- it was your cameras caught?"

Loki blinked as fast as he was physically capable, a microexpression that found its much grander echo in the poleaxed look on the medical examiner's face. "Er," said Laghari, uselessly.

"Protein consumption?" asked McRae.

"The cannibalism," said Loki, his voice flat.

"Do I need to impress on you how little Winnipeg needs a Gloria Ramirez incident of its own? Oh, that would look _delightful_ on international cable news. But far more importantly, your attendant could be sick. Your security could be sick. We don't know what happened, and we can't afford to be lax." Strange leaned back, satisfied with his brief but effective rampage. "Certainly we can't and have no desire to interfere with law enforcement, but if you'll let us do our jobs, I'm certain we can help clean up the _mess_."

Laghari looked defeated, sneaking a glance at McRae, who had small patches of red crawling up his neck. "We're not handing over the footage," said McRae, defiant.

Laghari jumped back in to try and calm the impending explosion. "But I'll re-open the investigation on our end, work with your team and do another medical check on the body, with NML on board. Meanwhile, owing to your advisory… McRae, I think might be useful if these agents reminded in the loop."

The red patches on the bull neck grew bigger and more radiant. "I don't think-"

"Of course our involvement will be _strictly_ observatory, unless otherwise requested," said Loki smoothly, seeing where the tactical landmines lay. The cop couldn't argue non-involvement, not easily. He'd set it up himself. "As for the footage, well, we'll let our various other departments fight that one out. No need for us to get in a pinch. Our people will be in contact in that regard."

"I'm still not happy with that," said McRae.

"I realize, Superintendent." Laghari was all business now. "But I think it would be best. For the public health, of course."

"I'm not going to sit here and have my people involved with a bunch of weird ass SHIELD nonsense, where they sit around and chase some aboriginal bull-"

"Superintendent, that's enough." Laghari inhaled, not noticing the matched set of fresh poker faces. "Gentlemen, I'm sorry this turned out to be more, ah, confrontational than expected. We'll be in touch - on better terms next time, I expect."

. . .

Loki hit send on a detailed email back to the team waiting at SHIELD's secure base, glancing up at Strange and his cup of slightly better quality coffee from his phone when he was done. " _Someone_ will get that recording out of them. I suppose it just won't be me. That might be better for everyone involved, really. I was becoming annoyed, and no one ever seems to enjoy it when I become annoyed with them."

"I'm not going to apologize for stepping over whatever verbal murder you were going to commit on that idiot cop." Strange threw the empty styrofoam into a nearby bin with a decent dunk.

"I'm not going to ask for one. I'm not so arrogant I can't admire a decent assault from another corner. Was a good blindside. It worked, which is, I suppose, the important part." Loki put his phone away inside the jacket pocket of his suit. "What was that McRae going on about at the end?"

"Exactly what he said. Bullshit." Strange rolled his eyes, still irritated enough with the encounter that he was forgetting how much he disliked being around Loki for longer than five minutes at a stretch.

"Is that your professional medical opinion?"

"It is, actually. I know what he was going to veer onto. SHIELD's had a reputation for years. It's not just you, you know. There's a lot of corny pop culture history to the organization that civilians pick up on, SHIELD just had the bad taste to put you in charge of a portion of it. The men in black. Secret helicopters. Area 51. You and SHIELD entire could be the new Mulder and Scully. Or the old Mulder and Scully? I guess that show's back. All that nonsense, anyway. I suppose looking back with what I know now, some of it may even be true. You tell me. Anyway, so this walking waste of time sees us roll up on a corpse that got a nosh, and I can tell he's a man that wouldn't be out of place on a SWAT team in Ferguson, if you catch my drift. Winnipeg's _other_ grim little problem that we used to hear about in that Jersey ER."

"Mm."

"So he jumps to the first semi-mystic and in this context more than a little racist assumption that he thinks would bring SHIELD out here. Like we're Bigfoot hunters. Only I will bet you a hundred dollars and an _omakase_ dinner at Shuko he was about to yell at us about the wendigo." Strange sounded suddenly exhausted.

Loki cross-referenced that in his mind and didn't come up with much, except the basic dictionary definition. "I'm… not very familiar with that one."

"Don't bother on account of this. It isn't relevant, although I give him one fifth of a point for being in the right part of the world for the tale. He was probably rousting First Nations kids at a diner up the street last night for fun and had it on his mind. The wendigo is an Algonquin myth with specific regional and cultural ties, not just another wandering ape creature." Strange sniffed at Loki's studying expression. "We did several courses on global mysticism and cryptozoology at Kamar-Taj, how to identify something that defied cultural borders and what was strictly internal lore. Some jackass slipping into morgues for a nosh isn't going to trip and suddenly become a wendigo, whatever the latest horror movie fad might say."

"Mm."

Strange shrugged, then finished with a terse tone that belied his old life as a self-assured, competent, and arrogant neurologist. "Besides, the body would have been chewed up like _Jaws_ , not neatly sliced. Wendigo are not concerned with proper plating. They hunger. That's the entire point."

Loki left his back pressed against the wallpaper and plywood wall, feeling the shoddiness of the construction through his shoulders add to his general irritability. He mentally ran through the few details they had now - the specificity of the cannibalistic attack, the reluctance to hand over the tape, the impending dragnet, and how little he wanted to get right back into the car. "The team will get us the recording from the morgue one way or another. I added a request to try and get Winnipeg's possible ID of our hungry individual out of them, plus a deeper background check on the corpse. Worth a look. Would be better if I knew who they thought they were chasing here, add a cross reference."

"Think they're going to catch this fellow tonight?"

Loki laughed, caustic. "No."

. . .

The young cop continued to lean against the opened driver's side of his car, the puck of the old-style wired radio in his hand as he listened to the static from the console. Being the new kid, he got the oldest tech. On the other side of the highway, he could see the ranking officer with his sleek newer vehicle and his proper walkie-talkies. Same crap job, though. Monitor the Trans-Canada going east out of Winnipeg for the vaguely defined perp.

A louder rush of static. " _All units, check in?_ "

The young cop glanced at the other vehicle as the radio picked up the murmur of other positions chiming in with a response. Officer Eddie was busy fucking around with something in the back seat. Eddie wasn't going to bother. The puck of the radio, sweaty-slick in an unnatural October heat, fumbled around in his own palm before he let his thumb flick to transmit. "Yeah, uh, Highway 1, Officer Panadis checking in. We got nothing out here." _Okay, I did see four semis that looked overweighted, a screaming family in an ancient 'bago, and my coworker, who I hate, but that's not what you asked for_. He considered getting a new job. Literally anywhere else. Maybe Vancouver.

" _Roger_." The dispatcher sounded bored. " _Next check in at twenty._ " The static dulled.

Officer Eddie pulled back out of the back of his car with a thermos of coffee, looked at the traffic, then ambled across the street when it was clear. "Thanks for getting that, Ryan."

"Yeah." The younger cop tried to not stare at the thermos in disbelief and annoyance. _Officer Chet Lazytown here couldn't get the radio because he was busy playing barista_.

"I don't know what the fuck they think we're gonna get. So we got a maybe ID. Chief thinks we're gonna see a fuckin' hearse with a bumper sticker says, 'ASK ME ABOUT MY MEAT' or what?"

Officer Panadis blinked. "Huh?"

Long pull off the coffee. "You didn't hear?"

"I'm the new guy, nobody tells me shit." That much was true.

Officer Eddie looked down on him over the lid of his thermos, eyes half-lidded like he thought he was doing the rookie a favor. "I ain't gonna, either." Another sip. "Besides, way I hear it, it's going to be out of our hands anyway."

"Why's that?"

"Somebody got those weirdos, SHIELD, out here on this thing."

Panadis took that in, interested. "You got any more coffee left?"

"No."

. . .

 _4 miles north of Highway 1, near Oak Lake_

Ned eased the door of the wildlife enforcement truck shut without thinking about it, a long-time habit when trying to not tip off poachers that he was getting close. He didn't know for certain that's what the call-in was about, but several nervous reports on the anonymous line about _something_ going on just off the Trans, well, it was at least worth a look. He had a shotgun in his other hand, already loaded. It'd been three years since the last time he'd fired a shot from it, and that had been to scare off a bear. He was hoping it'd be another three before it had to come up again.

He lifted his head, getting a good sniff of the early evening air, clean and crisp, no trace of the highway in it. No fire, either. Off license hunters usually caved and heated up something to eat once they were in the thick. Even if they only tended the fire an hour or so, the woodsmoke stayed in the air when it was sharp like this. But no, nothing tickled his nose.

 _Hey, listen, I saw I think some guy go into the woods west of Spruce -_

 _-Guy running in from I think the Pine Grove rest area-_

 _-I'm not sure it WAS a guy, like, they were really pale and-_

 _-Shaking or something, I don't know-_

 _-Maybe I saw a bear with mange?-_

 _-It was making this noise, I can't even describe…_

Ned peered into the trees off the trail with his hand on the door, stock still, just listening. Could have been a tweaker, sleeping it off with his ass on a tree trunk. Or a drunk guy. Anything.

There was a temptation to get back in the truck and check it out again in the morning. Finding some guy - if there even _was_ a guy - off the main roads this far back into the woods was going to be a pain in the ass. His hand twitched against the window frame, feeling the cold metal. But if it _was_ some drunk idiot out of the city, and he got eaten by a bear on Ned's watch, or died of exposure, or…

"Fuck," said Ned, and he slung the shotgun over his shoulder. He picked a small Maglite off his belt and started to edge his way down the faint trail, trusting his senses to tell him he wasn't about to piss off some wildlife mama as hibernation season started to crawl in.

. . .

Thirty-five minutes later, Ned was hauling ass back to the truck, an empty shotgun still hot in his hands and a wild expression on his face. He scrambled in, locked the door, and stared at the woods, waiting for the _thing_ to follow him.

Nothing.

An eternity of a minute later, still nothing. He didn't blink. His eyes hurt, dried out and burning from the dirt he'd picked up on a spill on the way back he barely even remembered.

His hand shook as he reached for the comms radio. "Ahh-h-h-hhhh… Marie, this is Ned over on Oak Lake trail… ahhhh… I don't know what I saw… but I'm calling for backup to my position. Get city PD on it with me, I don't care, but aahhh, I'm not going back in alone."

" _I've got you, Ned. Paging for backup_." Always businesslike, Marie at dispatch back at the lodge still took a pause. " _Can I get a descrip, Ned?_ "

He breathed in, shaky. "Tall. Pale. Saw it up against a tree. Eating, I think. Like a little scrap of something." It'd been humanoid, sure, but human? "I don't know, Marie. It looked at me. But I don't know if it saw me. And it was shaking, all over, like ripplin' or something, as if…" He swallowed. "Marie, if it really is a bear with mange, I'm going to be so pissed at myself."

Marie stayed calm on the line. God bless Marie, he thought. " _Been on dispatch with you for four years, Ned. You get a mulligan with me, no matter how this turns out. Getting backup to your position. Hang in there._ "

"I'm pulling back closer to the main roads. I'll try to leave a mark here to set trail." Ned set down the radio and pressed his back harder into the truck seat. He swallowed once, hard and dry, and fumbled down for the bottle of water he always kept in the dash. Get some hydration before he dug for a reflective beacon he could leave, or a flare. He had to look down for a moment, realizing it had tried to roll under the other seat. "Dammit."

He looked up again, and saw something pale waiting between the trees. Roving eyes caught the glint of the headlights. Still tall and shaky - and _definitely_ not a bear.

Ned snapped the truck's ignition with a yell, threw the bottle off to the side, and screeched backwards off the trail at about thirty-five, ripping half the back bumper off when he scraped a fallen tree and not caring. He was out of there, and come morning, he was going to be _staying_ out.


	3. American Horror Story

3\. American Horror Story

. . .

"There's nothing here." Strange straightened up, black gloves flicking scraps of brown, dead grass from his knees. He sounded irritated, if mostly with himself. "No supernatural trace, no trail of ether, no sense of something walking between veils. Just a fleck of… well. Leftovers. I know full well you've sensed the same."

Loki made a noise, a grudging little murmur of agreement. "You're not missing anything, unless I'm missing something as well." Then he perked up, still feeling blackly humorous about the situation. "Which has, we must admit, happened before."

"We're not hashing that out again." Strange lifted his head and looked down the faint trail. "I believe the wildlife officer saw what he claims he saw."

"As do I. His career file suggests he's not a man to panic lightly, embellish, or be anything other than forthright when questioned by other authorities. The fact that he won't return here to the trailhead is telling. He was frightened, badly."

"But not by anything implicitly supernatural, near as either of our rather competent surveys can determine. At the same time, what he describes matches our fellow's proclivities for home-curated deli meat. Meaning a human figure, acting oddly, and drawn off the road." Strange turned to look at Loki. "Is there anything down this path? Maybe some hideout he was trying to reach?"

"No." Loki didn't find as much joy in Strange's visible deflation as he might have in other circumstances. "I called in a quick drone examination before we drove over. There's nothing out here except a few cabins by the lake that are accounted for, and a few old campsites. No further trail to be found." He inhaled, then let the human have half a point. "Not a bad thought, however. At this time, his purpose of direction remains vague."

"I occasionally binge on cop shows. Hospitals play a lot of them, it's a kind of comfort food. Not exactly a replacement for properly knowing the job, of course."

"Don't compare to me, I'm usually making this up as I go." Loki gestured back to the rental car. "I'll be right back."

Strange watched him, suspicious. "If you drive off and leave me in these woods, I absolutely _will_ make you pay for it."

Loki rolled his eyes. "I'm getting an evidence kit. There's probably something some other poor sap can test from the scrapes left on those trees. It's _procedure_. Did you miss that part on your cop shows?"

"No, I just trust you rather less than I did Lenny Briscoe."

"Fair enough. Whoever _he_ is."

A moment later, Strange watched Loki deftly pull a few flecks of bark from the tree with tweezers so small they all but disappeared in the slender but large hand. Skin traces, possibly. Or even bloodstains. The wildlife officer had indicated the figure was pressed close to this particular stand of pine, and Loki's eyes were better than most human ones. Worst case, Strange figured, they were about to send off a baggie and run a very thorough DNA test on a local moose. He snorted, but kept the thought to himself. "Why the shaking, though? What does that indicate?"

"Don't know. You tell me, _Doctor_. That said, air temperature was cooler last night, didn't sound like our friend was exactly bundled up." Loki squirreled the bag away inside the black pea-coat he was wearing over his suit. The evidence would find its way into the pipeline within a couple of hours. "So here's something rather more useful we can try. Assuming our cannibal was here, and I do think he was, there might still be something we can track."

Strange pondered that. "Bioetheric trail through the space/time membrane?"

"One of these days, I'm personally going to visit Kamar-Taj and beat every single one of you people senseless with the heaviest grimoire I can get in my hands - and I am familiar with some _very heavy_ books. You fools mock me for overbearing pretension, but you yourself can't be arsed to speak plainly when plainness is more effective. It's a heat trail, Strange. And it's an imprint in mundane space." Loki was staring up at a fat, fluffy cloud as if it needed to die to soothe his offense. "It's really ruddy simple, actually."

"Wong calls the technique 'bloodhounding.'" It came out in a mutter.

"Then Wong will be spared when I start to knock everyone's teeth out." Loki turned his irritable gaze onto his fellow sorcerer. "Or is this you admitting to me _you're_ the poncy outlier and everyone else is moderately more sensible? Spare your companions, O Sorcerer Supreme, and I'll just continue to abuse you instead."

Doctor Strange kept his silence for a minute, opening up his palms and making a handful of simple runes flow across them. "Been less than twelve hours since the sighting. I can set up a glimmer follow. We'll have to stay fairly close to it, since the trail will fade somewhat if I go too far out of range."

"You do that," said Loki, all ice and bitter humor. "I'll drive."

. . .

Strange kept his eyes on the magical trail before him, a miniature version of the world outside. He'd managed to overlay it onto a satellite-imagery map Loki had torn from the hands of a confused looking wildlife officer who'd foolishly wandered up to the driver's side window as Loki started the car.

Their dragnet failed, Superintendent McRae had become interestingly withdrawn over SHIELD's 'interference,' so once Loki had read off his credentials to the wildlife guy and flung the new map at Strange, the phone lay otherwise silent. Strange caught Loki glancing at it now and again, obviously waiting for someone back at the base to call in with some sort of useful information or an update on the DNA kit he'd sent off in the hands of another officer, given orders the human dared not refuse.

Now they were driving along the fringes of the deep woods, keeping to trails better meant for pick-ups and ATVs. Loki's sheer ire and, Strange hoped for the sake of the rental deposit, protective magic kept the Lexus navigating the dips and rocks of the trail neatly.

The trail itself seemed to continue north, deeper into the woods where eventually the car wasn't going to be able to follow. Either they'd get out on foot, or Strange could try to step out of body to see if the trail continued on back towards the freeway - or whatever the hell was going on.

"I wish they'd at least give up the damned recording. I'm getting a bad feeling about this." Loki broke the silence with a dour tone of voice. "A feeling that someone, somewhere, is wasting my time. It's a kind of paranoia, of course. I detest most local cops."

Strange exhaled through his nostrils. "One way or another, Loki, we are dealing with an individual that needs to be stopped from what he's doing, and may need help. Regardless of if the motive is supernatural or not, and regardless of your feelings on law enforcement."

"I still don't understand the description. Underdressed and cold, maybe, but this is not rational human behavior."

"Not everything humans do is rational." Strange's attention drifted from the trail he was creating along the surface of the map, looking out the window instead. "We get sick, things go wrong, and people get… strange. One good bump on the head and there's a chance we become entirely different. To be simple about it, which is oddly ironic. Complexity and simplicity all in one package."

Loki let that sit in silence for a moment. "That was your field, wasn't it? Human minds. Neurology."

"I was a neurosurgeon, correct. A very good one." Strange felt unbalanced by that now, as if that enormous part of his life was no longer really his. "Some of the most interesting cases were when I was called to the ER, which happened rather a lot. Not through regular practice." He frowned. "I _liked_ my ER work. Even when it was unsettling. Sometimes I think I liked it more."

"Why moreso then?"

"You care?"

"Your voice changed. I don't expect much in the way of introspection from you, Strange. I thought it was interesting."

"Go be incisive somewhere else." Strange slumped down more comfortably in the passenger seat, using his knee to pin the enchanted map to the dashboard. His slapback hadn't really been hostile, it was more or less a reflex. "I don't know the answer, really. Egotism of being in the thick of saving lives. Watching the breadth and impact of the human mind change and alter before your eyes… I used to watch neuroimaging maps to help me sleep. They're improving connectome maps every year, it's fascinating… the live wire network of the human mind. The white matter is giving up its secrets to us, slowly." He frowned. "But it's one thing to read the books, the journals, watch the computer imaging, and entirely another to see how it all can just happen in front of you.

"I think I went into neurology for two reasons. One, because it was the most difficult of all the specialties, particularly when I was choosing my career-"

"Of _course_ it was," interrupted Loki, making the small phrase drip with sardonicism.

Strange paused, tempted to open a window to let all the acid out. "The other because I think I believed it would help me understand people better."

"And how did _that_ work out for you?"

Strange's voice dropped into a mutter. "Not well, really, if we're going to be honest about it." His voice strengthened again. "But still. In a way, magic is approaching similar concepts through different paths. The neurological conduits of the human mind, the mystic interplay of the ley. How much, how strongly is sorcery and ritual reliant on our thoughts and our will?"

"My gods, for a human, you _almost_ get it."

"You're being an asshole again."

Loki laughed, unoffended. "Tell me about this ER work of yours."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "It's a long, dull drive to chase someone we don't understand, and it's a kind of battlefield you dealt with, which I do. I do understand triage work, Strange. It's dirty and awful and people of most races are terribly frightened during it. Asgard wasn't all gilded towers and fancy napkins."

"Just mostly."

"Now who's being the asshole?"

Strange glanced out the window, up at the early morning sky. "Are we absolutely sure we're not being watched by a SHIELD drone?"

. . .

The sound of a busy ER center becomes musical when it works, when it's just an evening's ordinary chaos, when there isn't a mass casualty event in the mix. An orchestra of blood and frustration and rapping words bouncing off neutrally-painted walls. Stephen Strange is in the second year of his practice and already gaining notoriety on the greater stage of his field, but during night shift at the city hospital, he's still a cog in the machine. There are nurses with more seniority than him, and he hasn't yet earned the street-level deference that will feed his ego into something huge and lumbering in just a couple more years.

So for now he's padding along waxed floors that are never quite as antiseptic as the civilian and the sick want to believe they are, and his latex-gloved hands are passing along the clipboards looking for the ones that need him, because the night nurse was hurried and rattled off four patient names and numbers at him, and he doesn't remember what they were because he wasn't actually listening, and he's not about to stop and ask. These four aren't emergencies any longer. They're consults. They've already been through triage and need Stephen to sign off on their transfers to the neurological floor where he does most of his work. He'll get to them. Once he finds them.

Medications and dosages lilt through the air, shouted from one end of the hall to the other, underlined by other padded feet, and comfy, plastic Crocs, and old sneakers. Anything that can be hosed down in the worst case scenario, because the worst case scenario is a familiar old friend in a city ER. Strange picks up and then puts down a cardiac file because his eye caught the word 'tremor' before realizing it wasn't for him, then sees for a second the bloody footprint across the hall, and the fresh mop that promptly takes it away. He can see that file's identity from where he is - GSW, died at 1:38 AM, and he sees a tall, burly man in a blue uniform inside through the small window in the door.

The time is now 1:54 AM. There is no longer an emergency in the quiet room with a dead gunshot victim and a cop waiting for final paperwork. It's so normal, Strange doesn't even wonder what the story there is. In a little while, the room will be cleaned, and the next patient will come in. They will be frightened. They may be in pain. And then there'll be someone else. It's the rhythm. Like a heartbeat.

 _Beat - Steve - I need some Dilantin in 12!_

 _Beat -thump- Crash cart in the loading area…_

 _Beat - Hey Frank, can you get me a bottle of-_

 _Beat - Heparin in 4, it's a (strange) blood gas-_

 _Beat - thumpthump- Fuck, who took the saline? Strange-_

 _Beat - Saline's on the cart, Betty. I'm on break for fifteen._

 _Beat - thumpthumpthump- No you're not, we've got two ambos coming in and… Strange!_

What's strange? Stephen reached for another clipboard with a shake of his head.

The out of place word blended into the ER's bloody background music suddenly becomes a name. His own name, shouted at him from behind. "Strange!"

Stephen turns around at the sharpness in the nurse's voice.

"Jesus Christ, I've been yelling at your back for the last minute." A minute is an eternity in an ER. No wonder the chief night nurse on duty is pissed. Her name's Claire, working this side of the city from her usual stomping grounds in Hell's Kitchen. Everyone knows Claire. She's already been a nurse for four years and there's already crow's lines at her eyes like battle scars and she often wears an easy, no-bullshit smile. She's going to be a lifer. Strange's current ER stole her for a couple of weeks because four nurses are out sick but Operations, citing expenses, would only bring in one from another hospital to cover the shifts. Someone's going to die needlessly because of Operations and because of money. But it won't be on Claire's watch, not tonight. "We've got two ambulances fresh in. One of them's already hollering for a neuro. That you, big guy? Or do I have to say sorry for bitching out the wrong person?"

"I'm Doctor Strange," says Stephen, mild. That's enough for Claire and she sweeps off, assuming he's following fast in her wake. He is.

She speaks to him without turning, trusting the sound of her voice to carry straight back, a blur of blue and latex hands and tight dark curls tamped down across her scalp. "I don't have the chart yet, they scraped this from just up the street. Female, head trauma, they're moving her into a surgery room immediately. Sounds like a domestic over the radio, but didn't get the details. Sorry, I'm throwing you at this one pretty blind."

Claire stops to wave him by her, her elbow kicking open the door to the room for him and he sweeps in, his best professional face on, and he stands there for a while, taking in the scene.

There's another girl outside the room just by him that Claire is now slowly guiding away. She looks shellshocked and keeps drifting back to the door towards her friend inside. For a moment, Strange doubted everything and wondered if she was the one who needed him. Because there's a young woman sitting perfectly upright on the gurney inside the operating room, and she's smiling at him, and her left arm is trembling slightly, but he can't _see_ anything wrong. Yet something is very, very wrong and he doesn't see it until he does and then the world goes turvy-whirly on him.

Stephen is in the second year of his medical practice and he thinks he's been ready, because he's up to date on the literature, absorbing everything he ever can with a photographic memory for details, and he's not arrogant yet, but he's cocky, because he thinks he's done the work and faced the worst before. He was wrong. He can still be shocked.

"Doctor," says the young woman on the gurney, and she sounds sprightly and young and okay, and he can't take his eye off the head of the nail that's been pounded into her left temple.

The nail is in so tight and clean that there is no blood. There is just the tiny silver coin of the nail head almost flush with her skull, and he might have thought it was a particularly edgy piercing at first, except that with his good doctor's eyes he can see the off-center imprint the hammer made when it drove the nail in.

"Doctor," said the young woman again. Her arm trembles. It's been two seconds already. He needs to move, get to work. He needs an angiogram to see if there's any major vessels at risk, and a tomogram, see if he's going to cause an aneurysm by removal. It has to come out, of course. ASAP. By the size of the head, it's not a small nail. It's caused enough nerve damage to start the arm tremor, but she's clear and cogent. Her vision seems okay, he's watching her pupils and they follow him just fine. But there may be damage under the skin that he can't see yet. "Are you all right?"

 _Am_ I _all right?_

Doctor Stephen Strange makes himself move. "Of course I am, Miss." He smiles, and he can't feel his face, because reality has just reminded him who's in charge. There are always going to be things the words he remembers reading as if it were only seconds before can't prepare him for. "I need to test your motor control, and we're going to get some scans done right away."

"Of course." The young woman blinks as if she's not quite sure where she is. "Where's my husband? Is he okay?"

He hears a commotion outside. Claire's voice. He drowns it all out. "Could you lift your left arm for me?"

She shifts a little on the gurney. Her arm still only trembles. "I'm sorry. I'm trying."

"It's all right," he says, and he hears the woman's friend crying on the other side of the door, and he thinks he knows what happened.

. . .

Strange was still staring at the sky on the other side of the car window. Loki let him tell the small old story without interruption. "Three hours in surgery once I got the tests back. She was fine, ultimately. It took several months of good routine before the arm tremors stopped, but she had no other complications. I stopped seeing her after about four months, personally. Her aftercare moved on to someone with an off-site clinic. A good young neurologist, a lady on the west side." He frowned. "The stories about old Phineas Gage are mostly bullshit, you know."

"I don't know. Who's Gage?"

He stirred in the passenger seat as he opened the window, sniffing once and smelling good, if drying grass. "Gage got a pole through his skull back in the days when horse-drawn carriages and iffy personal hygiene were still the going things. An excellent, lucky doctor by the name of Harlow put his head back together. The stories like to say Gage was changed utterly by the experience, becoming something like a madman, wearing his own filth like an apron. They're not true. Harlow did his legwork on the followup for years. Gage, with good health and routine, mostly recovered. An absolute miracle, say some. A fascinating case regardless. He backslid at the end of his years, following a series of convulsions and other setbacks, but he survived. As himself. He had a good life, was a caravaner through Chile. He was no mindless ruin, despite the absolutely horrifying damage done to his skull."

Loki was silent again.

"The other ambulance at that time I was in the ER, as it turned out, held the husband my patient wept for. He was DOA. _Very_ DOA." Strange's expression didn't change. "Another night, another GSW. Clean shot, plainly self-inflicted. Left the brain matter mostly intact. I found his name on a list years later, a document going around through private neuro channels because no one wanted to discuss it in the official journals yet. The little joys of a photographic memory. I read the name and it all came back like this morning's breakfast. They'd done an autopsy on him at the time. Semi-pro athlete. Advanced CTE. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Serial concussions, essentially. My patient took a four inch long nail through the skull and is to this day none the worse for the wear. This man thumped his helmeted skull as part of his daily business and eventually degraded into paranoia and anger - and when his wife wanted to leave because he had become someone frightening, someone _else_ , well, you know the rest."

Strange licked his lips, feeling the sharpness of his trimmed mustache on the tip of his tongue. "It's horrifying in its mundanity. There are stories like that one every day. It's not special, it'll never make an appearance in a major medical conference. There's far worse ones that made the news when this one didn't. It's just the one that stuck with me, because I was younger and it was still new and it taught me a thing about the world I never forgot. We are fragile, even when we're strong, and even in our fragility, we can survive terrible things. There is nothing dull about the process of being human. Ever."

The car took a sharp curve as Loki pulled onto a patch of bare ground where other rangers had parked before. Strange looked over to see the flash of a message on the phone, a text from Coulson that undoubtedly needed an answer, then saw Loki looking back at him. "Were you actually a good doctor?"

Strange paused, hearing the undertone in it, the actual question. "I tried to be. Then maybe I forgot a few things. Here I am now, though." He looked at his gloved hands and thought about costs. "I wanted to be."

"Introspection is a Hel of a curse, isn't it?"

Strange started laughing, understanding a little more about why he loathed Loki, while also grudgingly enjoying the man's company now and again. "It really is."


	4. Acceptable Risk

4\. Acceptable Risk

. . .

"Loki, I got your suspect ID. Not the footage from the morgue, yet. Daisy's on it, trying to make contact with anyone over there that'll swipe a copy for us, but it's definitely not on any internet-connected servers in Winnipeg's government banks. Got the whole series of The Wire off a local network, though. They have priorities." Phil Coulson swapped the phone to his other ear so he could wrangle the high-tech and extremely secure database he was using in the depths of the Playground, wishing vaguely Fitz was back from vacation. The goddamn thing's touch-controls were fighting his artificial hand for some dumbass reason he couldn't figure out. "Hang on, verifying that you're secure for this." Easy test. Essentially an echo tone that could actually interact properly with Loki's magic. That had been another fun afternoon with Fitz, getting that trick to work reliably.

" _I find it concerning that I've had to pull off the trail and essentially turn this car into a SCIF just to take a phone call, Coulson. What in merry hell did we step into this time?_ "

"Is Strange still there?"

" _Yes. Are you going to make me tell him to get out of the car? Don't mistake me, I'll be_ delighted _to do so, but he's already giving me a look. Also there's the bit where I'd have to modify the security spell to let him out without disrupting the work, but that's merely generic annoyance._ "

Coulson reread his file output, making the judgment call. If Talbot didn't like it, Talbot could kiss a monkey's butt. Strange wasn't a security problem. "We got a hit on the DNA and ran a background on the name we got out of the Winnipeg PD. They match each other. First scan of the guy's background didn't come up with anything interesting, though. So I decided to do a deeper search this morning through the secure archives we share with multiple agencies."

" _You're doing the thing where you're building for dramatic effect. Stop it._ "

"Your guy's name is Stanley Carter. We've got him on file. He's not ex-SHIELD, though apparently we scouted him at one point. He was a high profile cop in New York for a while until he got poached by the Canadian government where then they bounced him around a bunch of their security teams for a while. Then I've got an incomplete, redacted document that says he was part of something called Department K. I made some calls to a few people that owe me favors before texting you. At which point it got kinda weird."

A heavy, long-suffering sigh filled the line, which never failed to give Coulson a little smile. " _Do I even want to know today's definition of weird?_ "

"It's gonna go to maybe giving you a direction to head in after you finish beating up the woods out your way. Your guy knew your edible deceased, and I've got a list of dudes you probably want to try to jingle or dig up. Have I got your attention yet?"

" _Entirely_."

. . .

 _Earlier, by phone_ -

" _I'm not going to ask how you got this number, Phil, and you're not going to say my name the way I just said yours. I'm not going to ask how Nick's doing, or what you guys are up to these days. I've got ten minutes I can give you, then I have to change phone lines if I'm going to keep talking. Tell me what this is about so I can decide if I'm going to do that for you._ "

"Stanley Carter. Brent Jackson. Maybe others. Maybe. You tell me."

" _Motherfuck_."

"We're off to a good start."

" _Hang on. I'm going to line up another burner. If not two. You realize this erases what I owe for that night in 1997, right?_ "

"Ledger's clear once you tell me what you've got." Phil grabbed a pencil. Odds were good he'd have to destroy his notes later, and also make sure Loki bleached the data copy he would get, but meanwhile he had no doubt the nameless oldtimer was going to drop some stuff he needed to double-check. "I promise."

" _From you, that actually means something. I'm going off the top of my head here. If you want to be patient, I'll get more detailed in a few once I pull some docs. Department K was Canada's attempt to do some really stupid shit along the lines of Hydra's own Nazi eugenics bullshit and take another crack at Erskine's 'Rebirth Project.' Only they decided they were going to try and reboot the offshoot mutagenic experiments. Hinky stuff. Stuff closer to how Hydra made the Maximoff twins, and some of your new kids today._ "

Coulson leaned back in his office chair, hard enough to make the wheels squeak. "They were tweaking Inhuman/Kree DNA?"

" _Trying to trigger mutations of some kind, dunno about alien DNA. They tried it the first time almost a century ago, a whole weapons program under an X-designation, but it didn't catch. Don't know why. They put millions into it. Tried it again with the department just a couple decades or so back. Was Thorton's baby. Andre Thorton. He shared management with a guy named Stryker that time, an American that was a real hard nut. Stryker got moved with full honors off of active duty because, and this is how I heard it, he was into guns, Jesus, and holy hell. A real 'God loves, man kills,' type. If he were still active, Phil, your Inhuman kids would be having a real rough time of it right now, and I know it's already not exactly the kicks. Thorton loved the guy. Real bros._ "

"So how do my names come into this?"

" _Brent was a high level security cog in K, grandfathered on via being there for the end of Thorton's original weapons program, if I'm remembering right. I'll check again. Carter… I got a file, and I know the name obviously, but he's mostly just a guy. Security stringer under Jackson's watch. How's this coming to you, Phil? I might be able to string it together for you a little better._ "

Coulson gave his contact a shortened version of Loki's brief.

" _Jesus, Phil._ " Phil heard the connection crackle. " _Okay. Is this a clean line to contact you back?_ "

"That it is."

" _Okay. Give me twenty minutes. I'm going to pull some files and see what I can clean up for you._ "

"The Carter connection in particular, if you've got anything."

" _Roger that. Go have a glass of something hard for me while I do this._ " The contact rang off.

. . .

 _Twenty minutes later, sharp_ -

" _I made a few calls, too. You're not going to like this._ "

"Tell me."

. . .

 _The man on the phone_ :

Department K sounds like it's out of a bad spy novel, the sort of obliquely plain project name that tells anyone that hears it that, A, they probably don't want to know anything more about it, and B, the name was picked by a complete wanker.

Professor Andre Thorton was exactly that kind of wanker, Phil. Thorton was one of those bald, prissy bastards with wire-frame specs and fifteen copies of the same white shirt, and three different lab coats ironed fresh on the daily. At the time he kicks off Department K, he's stopped aging. He might be fifty. He might be eighty. Nothing supernatural or mad science about it, he's just gone smooth and bony the way these kinds of men do. The sort of man who seemed to born in one of those lab coats, a lab coat incarnate, the science wonk so disconnected from the art of living like a human that when he bothers to look you in the face, you know he's mentally recombining your DNA into something he deems better. The man that travels the world for his research, and likes none of it enough to let it change him instead.

We all know a dick like that. He just made it a career.

The only person he ever looked at with anything like emotion was William Stryker, the 'gracefully retired' American general that comes on in 1982 to transform Thorton's mostly dead weapons project into something new. A project rebirth of their own, if you like. Now, Stryker puts all his time into the Department once he settles in, and why not? His wife left him and his kid is dead. Some sort of genetic disease. No one knows the full story. He kept some of the kid's hair in a vial. He gave some of it to Thorton, that's part of how we know they were friends. Nobody knows what Thorton did with it. Probably don't want to know. It's not in anything we've recovered.

Thorton's original weapons project was based around recombinant mutagenic DNA, the goal being, naturally, a new super soldier that could be controlled and engineered with new traits, things we've still never seen the likes of, Phil. Guys with metal skeletons, shooting laser beams out of their eyes. Things like that. The Avengers would shit. Only, it never quite worked the way Thorton wanted. The weapons program was defunded over years as people got a whiff of how Thorton worked and how his subjects - all above board, of course, all the appropriate waivers signed, oh naturally, acceptable risks, all very legal - had a tendency to die in ways that meant their bodies kept getting 'lost' or pre-cremated before going home.

It's familiar stuff. You know the drill, Phil. We're not that clean, either.

But Thorton didn't give up back then. He draws up the documents for K, gets his crew together, gets a pittance of money from the military and some off the books sources that we think gave him a whole lot more, and they mostly shut the fuck up for a while and ran computer simulations on DNA. Well, so far as the books said. We know that's not what was actually happening. Stryker came on board ostensibly to be Thorton's balancing act. He was a lot more cautious about what could be done with the end results. The whole yin-yang thing, the closest we get to a smart idea in all this.

Then Thorton got squirrelly and the whole thing got shut down again about two years ago. Here's where it starts to get good, and by good, I mean nauseating if you can read between the lines. Sending you the files, Phil. Bear in mind all the dates are redacted, but I can tell you the last one coincides with the shut-down period. The rest are within a probably eight year timeframe before it. Tagging the interesting ones. Hanging up. Beep when I can contact again. I'll try to clear up the questions, but I've got a lot of them myself.

. . .

 ** _Log 4849_** :

Three ( _3_ ) total failures, batch 29.

* Dormant recombinant caused DNA error cascade, producing fatal viral load.

* Exposure to [ **REDACTED** ] prompted unexpected response. Full cardiac arrest resulting in brain death.

* Alteration of protein caused DNA error cascade, producing fatal viral load.

Full loss of batch 29, logged and noted. Disposal of biological material completed at 0905 this morning, supervised and signed by W. Stryker and S. Carter, signatures copied on second page of this document.

 _Personal notes_ :

I don't know what they did to try to re-engineer [ **REDACTED** ] genetic sample, but it's certainly of no use to me. Discarding it in favor of a return to standard GTCA manipulation. Stryker agrees, but then I expected that. His project to maintain oversight and control continues to outpace my work, which would frustrate me except that it is easier to force technology than it is the meat. A sentinel program, meant to put any genies I unleash back into the bottle.

I admire his faith in me. I have yet to even earn a puff of smoke. Meanwhile, third contact has given me materials suggesting again extraterrestrial influence on our species at several points in history. I can no longer entirely dismiss this. Nor, apparently, can I harness it. His security team doesn't like me. It doesn't matter.

I will be taking a two week break. I wish to visit Socotra for inspiration.

- _T_

. . .

Undated audio file, 32 seconds:

[ _high pitched screaming, ends suddenly_ ]

. . .

 ** _Log 5091_** :

One ( _1_ ) failure.

* EMS alkylation, insertion point mutation. Projections suggest potential cancer, no useful result.

Subject disposed of as per protocol, non-harmful waste.

 _Personal notes_ :

Genetic movement of this nature is too small and precise to produce interesting results. Subject was conscious and emotional for procedure, but did not induce any secondary alteration. Attached are their vitals, note the cardiogram. Stress perhaps a catalytic, but not powerful enough in this situation to trigger anything useful. Will do further research, but marking this to forward to Killebrewe. Maybe that ghoul can do something with it.

I'm going to Asia for a while. New Guinea I must center myself within the world, so I may understand better how to disassemble it.

- _T_

. . .

[ _Four corrupted video files, each one fifteen seconds long. Only one contains two black and white seconds of viable footage, but no sound. The camera is in an out of reach high corner of a small hospital-style room. The video shows there is an empty gurney with a nest of sheets. There are unidentified stains on the sheets. Someone runs past the door outside, and the door rattles. Something flies up and smears the camera lens, thick and viscous. There is nothing else visible on the recording._ ]

. . .

Fingers scroll through a series of daily reports. They are mundane, except for the fact that Phil can tell people are dying in every iteration of Thorton's experiments, and he continued to write about it in the same dry, dull log of events better suited for small electronics repair. He pauses at one, an incident report attached to it. It tells him, plainly, this:

 ** _Incident file 307_** \- Security officer S. Carter breaches protocol during an engagement with subject **###-###** , enters a lab with a procedure in progress. Officer Jackson withdraws Carter within guidelines. Carter held for six days for observation, given counseling regarding his observations, then released back to active duty.

 ** _Incident followup, unknown date_** : Carter continues to pass rigid testing.

. . .

Undated audio file, one unidentified voice, gender unknown, 5h, 23 min, sample transcript:

 _"Please make it stop."_

 _"Please make it stop."_

 _"Please make it stop."_

 _"Please make it stop."_

 _"Please make it stop."_

 _"Please make it stop."_

 _"Please make it stop."_

 _"Please make it stop."_

[Audio continues to repeat]

. . .

 ** _Log 5173_** :

Five ( _5_ ) failures.

* All five exposed to ionized mutagens. DNA base pairs suffered total breakage. Acute cellular degradation. No salvage.

Personal notes:

Another incident in the lab. Objection has been noted, and Carter is being escorted off-site. This is the second, I believe. How unfortunate our process failed to stop him. Regardless, quite a time to remember his misplaced faith. Stryker and Jackson will reorganize security protocols in the wake of the issue. This could have been avoided if we'd kept the delicate out of the lab.

Regardless. Cannot replicate Banner incident. Cannot replicate Blonsky incident. Cannot replicate anything.

I grow frustrated. Headaches are increasing in frequency. I suppose I should schedule an appointment.

- _T_

. . .

Undated audio file, voice identified as Andre Thorton, 3 sec:

" _I can't seem to stop the bloody shaking!_ "

. . .

 ** _Log Final_** :

 _Personal notes:_

Thorton has closed down the project with no explanation and declares himself on sabbatical. He won't even explain anything to me. I hadn't seen him in days when he did it, and he called me by phone to do it. Wondering if he had a breakthrough and wants to keep it to himself. Or if he's sensing the other problem I'm dealing with.

Security breaches have increased while I start the process of the shut-down. Someone's fucking around, thinking I won't see them. I want to think it's Carter, but his alibi is solid. Might be personal dislike on my part. He's still passing our tests, staying in view. I've got at least four other released security personnel who have been off their baseline since we've cut ties. Most of them suspect the continued surveillance we've been doing to them. Signing a document doesn't guarantee they'll keep their silence. And meanwhile, Carter went and found God over it.

Maybe he'll just pray in a corner and leave us alone.

I called my ex-wife. She hung up on me. I have a good pension, and Thorton has left me the finances to unravel. I'll be fine. The rest will survive. Ensuring the disposal units are cleaned first, of course. We don't need evidence left behind. No one understands what we tried to do.

\- _Stryker._

. . .

Phil let the monitor go sleep-mode dim while his mind tried to absorb it all, staring up at the ceiling while he waited for the secure line to reconnect him to the contact. When he heard the telltale click, he didn't wait for acknowledgment. "Was the biological 'waste' found?"

" _No, Stryker did his job, clean and professional. That's the only clue we have that they were disposing of people the way they were. We don't even have all the documents, as you saw. If we did, we'd be able to shut this shit down any time one of these guys pop up. We did nail that Killebrewe guy a couple years back, at least. Ex military guy. Was building himself a nice little workshop crew. They didn't get anywhere either, but not for lack of trying_." A sigh came over the line, hard and heavy. " _I heard they were culling desperate cancer patients. Christ._ "

"And this guy Carter got a conscience at some point in there, after he saw something he wasn't supposed to." Coulson frowned, putting a guess together. "Catholic?"

" _Anglican. Why?_ "

Coulson thudded his head against the back of the chair, realizing he'd had a moment of idiot. "Nothing. I think I got swerved by a bad movie."

" _Okay. So here's the important shit. Thorton's dead, maybe it was Parkinson's. He was old enough. He died in Calgary last year. I don't have more information handy because he went down civilian. Maybe your guys can dig it up._ "

Phil made a mental note to put Daisy on that, too. Send whatever she got along to the guys. "And Stryker?"

" _He's stayed retired. I've got a handful of other names, other cogs that were onsite at the time. I can send 'em along, you can run the checks. I'm busy_." The undertone was clear.

"You gave me what you could. I appreciate that."

" _We're square. Good luck, Phil. Say hi to Nick for me._ " The contact hung up.

. . .

" _What was that bit about a bad movie?_ "

"Crappy film called _The Order_ about sin-eaters. Had Heath Ledger in it. I saw it in a theater and I kinda regret it."

A minor scuffle filled the line as Strange abruptly yanked the phone out of Loki's hand. " _Sin-eating is one of those odd little bits of Christian folklore that tend to jump denominations and show up in odd places. Anglican Christianity might be aware of it, yes. A number of villages in England knew of them - and also Appalachia even until recently, oddly enough. A protestant quirk._ " He sounded thoughtful enough that Coulson was suddenly glad he'd mentioned it.

Loki audibly snapped the phone back. " _Regardless of that detail, I assume you've already got something useful on Thorton's death, or you wouldn't have called yet._ "

"Getting the full death report on the professor is being a hassle, yeah. I'll have it within the hour. Meanwhile, can either of you guys think of a reason why they sterilized the entire autopsy lab when they were done with him?"

Another rustle on the end of the line. " _Was he embalmed or cremated?_ " Strange sounded like he was in the middle of jogging or something.

"Cremated. I'll send it over when I've got it." Coulson listened to the sounds continue, slightly in awe. It was like listening to kids fighting. "You guys okay?"

" _We would be_ fine _if the man would stop ripping my phone out of my godsdamned hand as if he were the one in charge._ " There was an unintelligible mutter. " _I don't_ care _that you have medical superiority here, Strange. Let me get this finished and then you can ramble at me all you care to._ " Another rustle. " _Get out of the car and finish running that trail, do me a favor before I make you_ eat _this phone._ "

Coulson waited for the sound of the door slamming. "So, you're having fun."

" _Don't_." The single word sounded loaded with menace. " _What about the other names?_ "

"We're tracking a few, but I'll send the annotated list over to you. Any of that help?"

" _It's a lot of pieces but we'll string it together eventually, surely._ " Loki still sounded annoyed. " _I can't shake the feeling this is not what I expected. It's one of my worse hunches._ "

Coulson shrugged, knowing Loki couldn't hear the motion. He'd at least pick up the tone. "Well, it's still necessary. And weird. But mostly necessary. Even if it just turns out you're running cleanup on a workplace grudge, that workplace needs to be understood better so we can keep shutting things like Department K down before they get any worse." The events of South Africa were still fresh in his mind. He had no doubts it was the same for Loki. "I want a day where we're not uncovering more trash like that."

" _I expect it'll be a while. And there's always some damn fool who think it'll be different for him, so he forges on ahead and makes the exact same mistakes all over again._ "

Coulson sighed. "Any good ghost stories in the woods?"

" _No_." Phil heard the knock on the car window through the phone line. " _Oh Gods, he's making faces at me. I suppose I should find out why. Anything else?_ "

"Nah. I'll just send you what I have. Good luck out there."

Loki muttered something unpleasant by way of farewell and abruptly hung up on him, leaving Coulson with a growing grin on his face.

. . .

"I finally found something." Strange spread the map across the hood of the car, gloved hands smoothing over the folds. Between the cracks of his fingers, Loki could see the glimmer trail shimmer strongly. It underlined the human's point. "Small cluster of faded life - or more like strong emanations of death, really, about three miles in." He looked up at Loki when he finished shutting the door. "Obviously I think it's a gravesite. Not quite a mass one, but certainly a disposal location."

"For our Mr. Carter's use?"

"I'd assume, considering, but can't know for sure yet. You've got Coulson's documents downloading to your phone, you can undoubtedly verify when we find them." Strange turned and looked at the woods, then squinted up at the afternoon sky. "You up for a walk?"

Loki shrugged, his hands spreading in surrender. "I'm up for getting this entire situation over with. If that requires a brief walk through non-demon-infested woods, so be it."

"You really didn't enjoy last fall's little adventure, did you?"

" _Please_ shut up about the topic."

"You brought it up this time. I don't think I want to let it go. I only ever heard the faintest bit about it, and I was actually there at the end."

"There were reasons for it. It isn't up for discussion." Loki marched towards the fringes of the woods, rustling in his suit pocket to find the keys to the rental and click the automated button lock. When the car chirped, he froze and looked annoyed with himself.

"Realized you could have just snapped your fingers?" Strange smiled at him, all happy malice. "It's sort of like becoming bilingual, isn't it? You've been going _native_."

"How many traces of death did you sense at that site?"

Strange saw the obvious bait, went for it anyway for the drama of it all. "Five, I think. Maybe six."

"What's one more?"


	5. Hannibal Rising

5\. Hannibal Rising

. . .

Loki tapped at his phone as he continued to identify the decaying bodies. The five corpses weren't buried deep, only left under some leaves for the birds and bugs to get at them. Strange took his turn and peered at each, noticing one finer line cut along each side like a slice of beef, matching their original victim's careful post-mortem attack. But these… He let his gloved hands flow over the grave, matching auras and reconstructing the violent energies well enough to get a clearer idea of what happened. Strange broke the silence a moment later, birds rushing and chirping up into the sky. "He killed these."

"Yes, he did." Loki's finger hit the side of the phone, turning it off. "And yes, all five have a match in Coulson's data. They're all formerly part of Department K."

Strange hunkered down next to a leaf pile, smelling rot and fungus. A heavy, earthy smell. From death there would come more life. But meanwhile, it certainly didn't smell like a healthy lunch. His stomach roiled, turning over once before he reminded it that he'd dealt with far worse. "I absolutely need Thorton's autopsy file when you've got it. Police records. Time of death. We know it was last year. I want more information about his travels, and I'd like access to his previous health records, too, if your people can get them."

"His notes have your attention that strongly?"

"I won't make a diagnosis until I get more data. But it's patently obvious Thorton shut down his beloved and monstrous project because his health got in the way. The nature of his autopsy gives me a very strong potential theory. But it's not the sort of theory I want to claim until I'm _sure_." He looked up from the rot to Loki. "If I were practicing medically, what I'm considering is rare and particularly unusual. The evidence of it is circumstantial. But it fits."

"All right, Scully." Loki looked down at him, amused. "I'll defer to you. _Medically_."

Strange stared at him until the other sorcerer stalked off again. Then Strange called after him. "So what is it about dark and gloomy woods for you these days? Evil book got your tongue?"

The glower he got in response had real and physical heat behind it.

"To be fair, the book in question is literally one of the most evil things in existence. I don't blame you for being touchy about it." Strange shrugged, trying to be placating. Joking about the Darkhold wasn't the classiest thing he could do, but his curiosity was real. "I did read Melinda May's report about the incident last year. Not emotionally engaging, she's too good at cubicle-speak. But they got at you a bit. The book's demons."

"I don't care for demons much, Strange, no. Never have. And as grouchy as I may seem over this more mundane issue, at least this isn't _that_." The phone was back in Loki's hands, more as an object of distraction than anything important.

"They were using memory feedback, she said. Old stunt, I've read loads of work on the tactic. Something about Muspelh-"

The air around him seemed to crackle. Strange rocked back on his heels, quiet but otherwise unperturbed by the silent warning. Loki was staring at him, openly angry now.

"Nope, now I'm too curious. I'm aware of the realm through a couple of grimoires written by idiots, but never been. I'm sure that's wiser, considering it's nothing but death, fire elementals, demons, fangy critters, and creatures that are some god awful mix of all the above, but I don't know anyone that's been there and lived." All that said, Strange quietly put up an extra layer of magical shielding in case he was about to get dropkicked. "Which makes sense, being as the realm is technically more Asgard's thing than Earth's."

"So, what, you want a travelogue of mine to crack jokes about?" Loki still looked hostile.

Strange blinked, realizing he'd undermined the entire conversation with his own usual attitude towards the other man. "No, actually. My curiosity is honest and professional." He looked for a way to soothe the offense made, found the obvious. "Just as is our apparent joint tradition, it comes off with sounding like an asshole."

Loki still glinted at him, his eyes emerald hot, but the anger visibly dropped to annoyance. He resumed studying a different corpse than the one laying by Strange. "Cause of death for each body is obviously violent, we agree on that, but there's been enough decomposition both physically and spiritually that I'm not quite sure what each suffered. I suppose I'll have to tag the location and have someone else sort it out. A basic enough job. One of SHIELD's 'hundreds' of medical examiners on staff can handle it."

"Aura tag says all the same assailant, and all of it ties back to my trail spell. So, not admissible in court, but I'll tell you between us that it was absolutely our hungry jack. Probably good enough for your man Coulson, meanwhile." Not one to miss a chance for some good, black humor to get him through the weirder moments of life, Strange was still trying to figure out how to make a proper Hamburger Helper joke, but hadn't quite gotten there yet.

Regardless of the fact that it was probably going to be lost on Loki.

"We've got a lot of information now, and I feel there's some obvious stringing together of it all, but we're not quite there yet. I'll try to get your files on Thorton hurried up." Loki's phone was hidden away again a moment later as he went quiet. "I don't like discussing Muspelheim because I was there when I was very young. Not even a hundred years old. It was my first battlefield as a sorcerer, and I wasn't a strong one, not then. I'd never seen anything like it. Still haven't, really. Parts of the incident last year were close enough."

"Why were you there?"

Loki wasn't looking at him. Another corpse had his interest, this one's head melding into the rotting loam and moss at the base of a lush and living tree. Grotesquely elegant, in its way. "The Queen wanted to be certain I understood the entirety of magic. That it wasn't all pretty illusions and clever tricks. Like I told you."

"Making sure you got the harder lessons while they could make a difference." Strange knew a few things about that.

"Mmm. Unforgettable ones. As I was forced to mention to Agent May. Well, perhaps not forced, not then. It mattered that she knew the danger we were in." What was going unsaid but seemed obvious was that Loki was going to be more open with his companions from SHIELD than he ever was an Earth sorcerer he barely pretended to tolerate. Strange remembered clearly the words May transcribed from their first nighttime encounter with the Darkhold's servants last year, though. _Have you ever seen demons eat a man_? "Fortunate the incident resolved as it did. It could have been vastly worse."

"Might yet come back around. Even a single loose page is enormously dangerous." Strange sighed and got up from where he'd been hunkering. "I don't know why you get _that_ hostile on the topic, much less my attitude about it. If anyone understands the purpose of whistling through black sorcery-"

Loki cut him off, but not with the same rage in his face. "It was personal. It was not just about magic." He looked down at the corpses with an unreadable expression. "Little like your trials by fire in an ER, I suppose. Making damn sure you know the worst of it, making sure you'll never make those sorts of mistakes. I'm circling around a point." His voice trailed off.

"No, you just engineered an entire new sub-genre of mistakes." The jibe fell out of Strange before he could reconsider the wisdom of it.

He got a long, blank look from Loki. Then, grudging and rattling and low, Loki managed a laugh.

. . .

"Miss Johnson tells me she'll have what's available on Thorton within the next couple of hours. She's also working on a lead in Winnipeg, someone who might be able to wrangle a copy of the morgue recording out of the evidence locker for us. There is apparently no shortage of cops disgruntled with their own system." Loki flung his cellphone onto the dash of the car and let the driver's seat drop back several inches, leaving him prone and tired-looking. "We can't find Stryker, he's in the wind. Still searching. I gave them the information on our newfound dead, we'll have technicians out here tonight. I've also got someone running a check to see if anyone else is left in Winnipeg for our Carter to assault, because staking them out would be inarguably more effective than some random traffic dragnet."

Speaking of. "Heard anything from that McRae?" Strange otherwise didn't look up from the notes he was transcribing into a thin blank book - medical theory and a few other thoughts on the case. The enchanted pen in his hand worked better for him than most cellphone styli ever would now, although the loops of some of his letters still looked more than a bit wobbly.

"One email, generic language, the bulk of it was an update from Laghari. To wit - they're doing what you told them to do. Message ends." Loki continued to stare at the roof of the car, his expression deadpan. "I don't think they like us."

"I don't like us, either."

Loki snorted, as expected. The joke hadn't taken much effort, and the response was always going to be about the same. "I'm hungry. Is there anything decent in Winnipeg?"

"It's a major city. At worst there's a bodega hidden somewhere with a turkey sandwich better than it has any right to be. I'm sure someone around here can do a passable steak." He realized steak sounded pretty damn good to his stomach.

"Thought you were a bad vegetarian."

"Emphasis on 'bad.' I spent a lot of time around Buddhist mystics. I think it's the guilt that keeps me on the greens. A little environmentalism, too, which is somewhat fairer." Strange braced himself, laying a personal bet on what was coming. "Also there's a lot of theorem about the purity of grown food versus the inherent violence of meat when it comes to magical energ-"

"Stop right there. Just… just stop." Loki was shaking his head slowly, but he seemed too weary to go all out for full dramatic effect. "Gods, you people. It's only _food_." He hoisted the seat back up and turned the car on. "I'm going to drive back towards the city until I find something that won't make me gag."

"Tell me about the Muspelheim thing and I'll google up a good steak joint."

That made Loki pause. "If I give in and talk about that, we're going to end up with vegetarian after all."

Strange stared at the woods and thought about the small copse of the dead half a mile in, the theory he was putting together coming back to the front of his mind, and his desire for a good cut of beef started to wane fast. "You know, maybe that _would_ be better. Some Gujarati food. There's got to be a decent Indian buffet somewhere nearby."

Loki sighed in a particularly defeated way.

. . .

 _Ago_ ~

Prince Loki spent most of his days acutely, almost painfully aware of his young age and his place, but from his current location behind the old Vanaheim sorceress, the two of them inspecting the small battlegroup the All-Father had arranged for this mission, that sense of self was reaching a kind of new agony. These were tested men - fifty warriors lined up in muted gold armor meant for a hard fight and not a grand parade, every one of them having the air of grizzled confidence that surviving multiple fields granted.

The sorceress was visibly less impressed with them. Her name was Groa, and Loki knew little about her save that Frigga held her in remarkable esteem. Enough so that as far as he figured - if not on paper - _she_ was the one that would end up actually leading this sortie by the end of it, and that Frigga had pulled him aside to impress on him the need to follow her magical guidance once they'd actually passed through the way to Muspelheim itself.

Not that the warriors were going to accept this smoothly when the time came. The formal command went to Lord Volund, the fifty-first member of the battlegroup. Like his troops, his armor was plain and plainly gilded, strapped with ancient leathers worn so supple they no longer creaked whether they were fresh oiled or not, and his dull gold helmet was currently shoved under his arm like an afterthought. Volund watched the sorceress with open suspicion, and only the practice of nobility kept that look off his face when he glanced at his equally sorcerous prince next. Loki saw it lurking under his skin, anyway. Such was always going to be magic's price, one of his first harder lessons. That much didn't bother him, so long as the warrior remembered to act polite to his face.

Volund would forever bow to the Queen's command, Loki expected, but at the same time Loki saw future conflicts brewing that he didn't know how to handle yet.

His stomach was empty but for the acid storm of nervousness growing in the bottom of it. Hidden away within the riding gloves, at least no one could see Loki's palms were already sweating cold. He was not yet a hundred years old, and he would look far more like a child than a man for a while longer.

Groa stamped on the grass of the palace green with the butt of her gnarled wooden staff, scattering the morning dew with an intensity that made it seem as much ritual as anything else she did. Her white hair was bound tight in braids shot through with green ribbons and twigs of almost sparking herbs that made the prince wrinkle his nose when downwind of her, and her strong voice had no trace of the ancient age that was plain in all the rest of her face. "You men of Asgard say you know what comes, and that you will serve and you will fight on the road to stop these invaders. I, old Groa, witch of Vanaheim, will not stand in your way, for that is what you are - but I will say this. When I warn thee to hold back and stay safe when we are within the grasp of Surtur's hel-fire land, you might, good men, just might consider listening to this old woman for a minute or two."

The warriors shifted, looking to their lord first. Volund dipped his head as a polite leader would do. "Your wisdom will of course be appreciated, my lady. The Queen has all my gratitude for recommending your expertise."

Groa's face was unreadable. When the lord turned away, however, she glanced at the young prince still behind her. Without an ounce of politeness in her voice, she said to Loki, "Most of these idiots are going to be dead two dawns from now."

He blinked at her, stunned into silence. He already had an art for the silver tongue, but it was obviously not going to help him here. Groa had no time for his words.

"Your mother tells me you're a more clever child than most. If she's teaching you the secrets, you might be worth the effort. Listen to this old bitch, and we'll get the job done and make it home for tea after. If you've any stomach left for it. Might need a little mint to settle you." She studied him, bald and cold but not completely unkind, either. "I promised her I'd try my best to keep you out of the blackest of what may come, and I meant what I said to her, but I'm not the sort to save anyone foolish enough to make their own danger. Are we clear, boy?"

"Yes," Loki said, startled by the brute honesty. She wasn't about to treat him like a prince, because to her, that's the least interesting thing he was. He began to get a hint of why the Queen respected her so much.

Groa grabbed at one of his gloved hands without permission, squeezed it while he continued to stand there, frozen. She studied him closely, close enough that he knew he would never be able to hide anything from that stare for very long. "You're frightened."

"…Yes." It was hard to not feel shame about that. The warriors certainly would never admit to such a thing.

"Dip me in Hel's black pools. You really might be smart enough to make it down the old path." She let him go without apology, ignoring the stunned look on his face. "She explain _why_ you're assigned to this?"

Loki nodded.

"Good." Groa stepped away from him and watched the men file towards the walls of the palace, organizing and strapping on their field gear, well-trained machines. "The younger we are when we see the worst of it, less likely we are to fuck it all up later. Your mother knows that well. I was younger than you are now the first time I saw something like _them_. I still dream about it." She glanced back at him, and her eyes were a hard brown. He saw a lot of the past in them. She was not trying to be cruel to him, old Groa. She was a survivor, and she wasn't yet certain if he was. "You're going to see an awful lot of the worst these next few days."

Loki swallowed, realizing he had no idea what he was about to be thrown into. The books were nothing, only words. This was going to be _real_.

By nightfall, they were going to be in the depths of Muspelheim, crossing leagues of hard, demon-infested terrain, to stop an attack an off-world mercenary had warned them - at the edge of a knife, true - was coming. If this battlegroup could cut off the incursion point, then a legion of cursed elves who'd claimed the name of the broken dark couldn't make it to Asgard itself, much less chain for themselves any demonic allies on the way.

It was not going to be an easy matter, and those same demons would _want_ that chaos, feeding into it, helping it thrive. Not to be simple servants, but to break the light of Asgard. Enemies coming on two fronts, and all of it deadly, and he was going to be seeing it alone in a way he'd never had before. Frigga was monitoring the situation from the high tower with the councilors and the advisors, and this was not a fight for Thor, who had hugged him this morning and been able to say nothing else but farewell and good luck. He'd looked terrified for his brother, though, and Loki carried that both as a comfort and another fear.

With his brother at his back, he could have at least felt a little better. Instead, he stood here alone. With an old witch who could no longer afford love, much less kindness, because of all the things she knew and had seen.

Loki took a long, slow inhale, and went to collect his own pack of field supplies, including the gleaming athame that now seemed far too small and light to protect him against what roared in the realm of fire.

. . .

Loki had wondered if Groa was going to take one of the horses. War machines weren't a thing they could often afford to lose in Muspelheim - the demons there were clever and would take magicked technology for their own if given a chance. Horses could be reliable, carry deeper rune protections, and most of all, be disposable without creating greater risks for the kingdom. The front line of the battlegroup all rode on hardy steeds, big warhorses trained to never break or run without the right command, and the Lord Volund rode the sleekest and blackest of all. Loki had a horse brought in the train as was his royal right, but he'd chosen to walk for now and let the speedy little mare carry packs for the marchers. That had earned him a few looks of gratitude, sharing that bit of kindness.

But Groa walked, and no old and stable-natured mare had been brought along for her. She kept pace with her staff in hand, and she seemed to have more endurance than many of the younger soldiers. He watched as she moved, the staff tapping along the broken, sometimes near-molten scorch of this unpleasant realm as she studied a horizon that was always the colors of blood and fire, and eventually he realized what she was actually doing.

He picked up his pace to come alongside her, matching her gait so he wouldn't interrupt anything if he spoke. "There's ley energy here?"

"Hmm." The corner of her lip quirked, the river-run of lines deepening in dry amusement. He wondered if he'd passed some sort of silent test. "The lava deep underneath carries it all, like water. Hate and fury and anger. Makes for bad magic, boy. You don't want to touch it, but you want to know where it is and where it's going." She looked at him askance, staying focused on what she was doing. "Even the stone belongs to the things that live in the fire. For them it's like quicksand. The lava will change stream if they bid it, and when it does-"

"We're in trouble."

"Mmm." _Tap-tap-tap_ went the staff along the hot stone. "You're doing a decent job with the dampening spell, but sprite scouts are still going to whiff us out before too much longer. They'll run straight home to _that_ one, and he'll send much worse. We'll need whatever warning we can get, and it likely won't be enough."

As if _they_ could hear, only a few minutes later Loki felt the stones lurch under his feet like an ocean wave, a symbolic sensation, not true, but real nonetheless. He felt the blood drain from his face while he still looked at old Groa, and she was looking back at him, and her face was stony and at peace. "Groa?"

She kept a firm grip on her staff as the ley boiled and raged deep underneath where they stood, and he saw the little carved rune lines all along its ebon wood begin to gleam in old warnings. "I was wrong, boy."

Loki watched her, and knew as frightened as he had been, he was even more frightened now. It seemed like the very molten core of Muspelheim had come alive, and all the fire in the universe was now a furious ocean just underneath the dead coals of the blackened land.

"These men aren't going to survive _one_ damned night."


	6. Eaters of the Dead

6\. Eaters of the Dead

. . .

The dead earth fought the gleam of Loki's athame every inch of the way, as if it knew what he was about and wanted to keep the defiled land as it was. Even the air seemed thicker now, catching in his throat as he coughed out the tangling rites of purification. Still, he could be stubborn when it mattered most, and he continued to etch the wide ring of protection around what was going to be a painfully tight encampment.

Groa watched over him, shoring up the boundary in her own ways, and the sharply gleaming smells of the herb magic she specialized in filled the air - but only within the camp. Sometimes Loki caught a whiff of Muspelheim itself, snaking around the edge of the unfinished ring to strike at him, hot and hateful. Not just the air itself now, but the redolent, deathly smell of _them_ underneath it. The demons that called the dead land home. Things that swore fealty to the lord of the fire, the only power here greater than them.

Old stories told legends of something else living in Muspelheim - flame elementals shaped like wyverns, and smart but quick salamanders, and wisps with sentience and rare mercy. Sometimes would-be wizards would still brave the land to find their kind to bind old oaths, but nothing Loki had read thus far said that any found success - much less that they had come back alive. Only fantasies and fables said otherwise. If such gentler things could thrive here, they were either well-hidden from furious old Surtur, or they had long since disappeared. Loki now believed it had to be the latter. There was nothing for him to find in the black dirt but hate for all softer life.

The heat made him miserable, something in him rebelling against it in a way that made him feel sick and whirly in the head the longer the hours wore on. There were tonics for that, and he sipped at a hidden flask of sweet cool liquid now and then that his mother gave him before he left Asgard, and it helped, but still. The land fought him, and the demons would want all their flesh for food before the night grew too dark. He hadn't stopped being frightened, though focusing on the magical work before him helped.

Behind him, the gathered warriors muttered, all of them displeased. To them, they were bivouacked in the open, and with only a gleaming magic ring between them and the enemy. Another bead of sweat dripped from the nape of his neck and down along the side of his throat, not from heat but from fear. She was going to be right. This night was going to be long and terrible and full of horror.

Volund was already arguing with Groa. There was an outcropping nearby, said his bravest scouts. A better place from which to stand and fight. And when she told him that standing to fight was no better option and that there would be no safe place ever in all of Muspelheim, Loki had watched the man's face pinch and crease in a way that said he wasn't actually listening, and certainly not to a witch of an old woman.

He could try to say something, but here, his royal title was ceremonial. He had no right and no real power over the much older lord. Instead, Loki licked his lips and continued to forge the magic ring, stopping suddenly when he realized he'd finally come back around to the beginning. It had taken two hours just to carve out the ritual. His hands ached, and his belly gnawed at him. Still, he finished with the flourish of his personal marque of magic, the small head of a snake finishing the ring and turning it into the old ouroboros.

He felt better instantly, the power of the sanctified ring coming alive and almost wriggling over his hands as he pulled away from the finished work. Groa shifted behind him. "Not bad," she said, small and grudging, and he could tell it might as well have been a bardic victory song from her. "Now the real work begins."

"How long until they come?"

"Not long at all. They're going to test that circle of yours in their way. You'll feel the tickle of them within the hour. The whispers next. And then the screaming, no doubt." He heard the little click of her staff against the flat stones under her feet. She tapped at him with it next, the action fairly gentle, considering. "Best eat while you can. We'll be busy 'til the dawn, once they start."

"Will there be a dawn here?"

"Of a sorts, boy. Good enough for our work. Come on."

. . .

The meal they ate was hard travel bread, made with herbs and berries and old grains, and there was thin wine and preserved fruit. No meat on this travel, not even cheese, and there the warriors balked, too. Some of them went hungry in protest instead, claiming they'd fed well in Asgard in the morning, and that would do them fine until they were home again in golden Asgard in a day or so. Groa looked at them, bland and peaceful, and only Loki saw the disapproving thinness of her lips.

A few patrolled the ring. Inside, at least, and Loki could tell easily they didn't feel what he felt. A hesitation in the air, a steady but faint tremor in the ground. Hints and omens. The sky was darkening, the orange fire of the horizon turning into a bloody ruby. There would be no stars here. Nothing to fix their position, save what they knew from the ground itself and Groa's guidance along the ley paths. A half-day's march to the incursion point, if they were in normal territory. Might as well have been on the other side of the world. Loki forced the food down, knowing he would need what energy he could muster. Groa was bitter and cautious, and he already trusted her far more than Volund. Honesty had that effect. He knew fully that she could _see_.

The first tickle of warning wasn't what he expected. It was the trace of a finger so hot it felt frozen, from the exposed skin at the base of his short-cropped black hair all the way down his armored spine until it met the tight bundle of nerves there, and every hair along the backs of his arms stood up under the ripple of his skin, fighting his silk and leather. He forgot to breathe for what felt like an hour, until he realized Groa sat like a stone, her expression saying she felt it, too.

Hot, sandy air whipped up and in it were the voices, singing and screaming in tongues Loki couldn't understand and never wanted to. He dropped the last shard of bread he'd been eating and whirled, checking to be certain, absolutely _certain_ the ring was holding. It was, but the sound continued. He could keep out demons, but not common air. Wrapped in it now were words of violence, and then they began to blend, broken and awful music, with the shouts of the warriors as they slapped on their shields and grabbed up their weapons.

"Have them hold fast inside the ring, if you think to live," shouted Groa. She was lifting herself up in a rustle of robes, turning towards Volund. He wasn't looking at her. "First strike won't be the worst, now!"

He finally glanced at her, then picked up his own shield, huge and golden, a legionnaire's blockade. "We have this under control, my Lady. We will stand. For Asgard." Then he strode off to stand with his men, waiting for the demons to come.

Groa whirled and her face was meant for no one, but Loki saw her anyway, and saw on her lips the harsh name she called the warrior. He might have laughed by instinct, startled by the fury she had, but there was no time for that.

A second later, they were _there_.

. . .

When demons appear without the veil of shadows, the lie that keeps most people sane is gone. When it is full night, at least the eye can pretend demons only slip out of the shadows, creatures of darkness. The word 'void' becomes its own veil, not quite comprehending what it means when it's said that something evil slipped out of the _void_.

What it actually means is something has terribly, awfully wrong with how the mind and the eye understands the world. There is something, then there is nothing. And then there is something again, pouring, bleeding out of a hole in the world, tearing its way through from somewhere else, something _else is among us_ , and oh gods, whatever pregnant horror is on the other side of that black and gored membrane of reality is _wrong_ , and there are no stars there and the sounds are like grinding steel and bones snapping and something shrieks and all of it thrives on the terror of the living.

Loki didn't run. He stood, frozen, his hands up and the athame burning bright in his hand as their sheer presence began to press and warp against the ring he'd forged, and all he could do was look at their terrible faces, knowing he was going to remember what they looked like for as long as he lived, but never quite able to say what he saw.

There was one in the lead, taller than the rest of the almost congealing mass of shattering fire-flesh. It stood like a man, but its legs were wrong in some way Loki couldn't identify, not even the casual strangeness of digitigrade posture, but as if they undulated despite the creature standing stock-still, watching him back. Built strong and wide through the waist, disturbingly familiar, but there was burnt chitin across its leathered skin and its face was indescribable - save for the venomous fangs, each as long and thin as one of his throwing daggers, and gleaming with sick looking magic and poison.

Many demons could be intelligent, making them vastly more dangerous than if they were just ravenous and mad. This one's eyes looked at him, bright and alien, and they not only saw him, Loki realized he was marked and remembered, should he escape it for now.

It said a thing to the roiling mass of shadows and claws around it, and Loki's ears hurt so badly that he knew they would bleed later. Pressure built and screamed around the ring he made and he could _feel_ it, as though they were all hammering against him personally - and in truth, on the ethereal plane of magic, they were. Anything in him that could pass for pure was under attack by their demonic filth, and there was nothing he could do for it. His legs began to buckle under the weight of their oppression, and he knew the ring would fail soon. It would fail, and they were all going to die.

And then more words filled the air, light and lilting, filled with the scent of herb smoke and clean salt, and he still sagged, but now out of relief. There was something building within the ring, a good, strong sphere, rebuilding and shoring up what he'd made, and now he saw plain in the rocks under him what Groa had been doing while he carved the outer work. She'd laid a trap for the things from the void, and knew they, opportunistic, would focus on his smaller work, and a second later the light screamed out like a thrumming song, forcing the demons back - some of them now in pieces. The rest would be even angrier, but at least they would be fewer. Magic could pick them off in better pace, while they worked safe inside the now-layered protections.

Loki coughed out a breath of relief, gathering himself and feeling no anger at being the front of the trap. It was a damn good ruse, which he instinctively appreciated, and she hadn't left him in excess danger. Just the fear, and he'd been warned up front he would have that. He could deal with that.

"They're falling back! Men, prepare to press them!"

A sword clanked against a heavy shield in answer and Loki struggled back up to his feet, trying to croak a protest that was fated to be lost in demonic shrieks. _You don't know, you don't understand. Can't you SEE them?_

They didn't, the warriors of Asgard. A brace of four men broke from the internal line at a shout of command, bloodthirsty and ready to do their part. They surged forward, and their gold-booted feet crossed the line of protection, and the demons sighed as one with eerie pleasure, joyful at the stupidity of the living and the semi-mortal. The clash ended within seconds, the ending like a bell of loss as one of the four tried to scream and save himself, thoughts of glorious war and eternal honor leaving him as flesh tore from the exposed bones of his legs like stripping a meaty fowl's thigh at high feast. But he wouldn't make it. All four, torn and devoured, the sound of meat and grind and gore snapping and chewing through the hot nightfall air. Loki knew he would never forget _that_ , either. He wanted to vomit, but he was still frozen under the need to hold the magic together.

Another brace of men lined up, but these ones did not charge. They looked at the bloody, wet earth where their fellows had been, and they looked back at the two mages, and Groa looked evenly back from Loki's side. Out there, the tall thing paced, still looking at the prince. "Hold here on this side of the ring. Press only when-"

"Damn _that_. For our fellows! For vengeance!" Volund shoved his way past his own men, his helm in place and his face alight. "They can't stop a full charge. Ten of us, hold the side and don't let them grasp us! End them, instead!"

"Don't be a fucking idiot!" screamed Loki, his royal manners entirely gone for the first time in his life. Volund glanced at him, and in his eagerness for battle and for vengeance, Loki saw in that face what he _really_ thought of the young prince who'd happily chosen the path of his mother's magic, and Loki hated him - but not enough to wish him the fate he was charging towards. He tried again, for the sake of the other warriors, if not the lord himself. "Volund, I order you in the name of the King to stand down!"

Volund turned away from Loki and stepped into the center of his readying line. A few of the soldiers glanced nervously at him, and then their prince, but in the end, they chose their lord. They chose to run out into the knot of furious demons, to honor those that had just died.

And then they died next. Loki watched. Watched Volund's throat torn wide open with a stray swipe from the tall thing with the intelligent and hateful eyes, watched ten men fall to pieces like wheat in a storm, and he could do nothing else to save them except remember that they died trying.

It was Asgard's way, and Asgard's honor, and Loki realized that the futility of it disgusted him to the very core of himself. _This is no true honor_. _This is its own kind of madness_.

Groa was behind him, and with an oddly elegant shove, her elbow knocked him forwards towards the remaining, shifting men. Her voice carried, careful but strong, most of her attention kept on maintaining the shield around them. "No more! No more losses, warriors! Heed your prince, and fight for Asgard's safety, not your own glory!"

To him, in an aside, " _I'll apologize later, if they listen and we live, but here's an all new lesson for you, prince: How to weaponize someone else's position._ "

Thirty-five openly terrified warriors looked to Loki, and he noticed for the first time just how very young some of them were. A few could barely be older than himself, their beards patchy and the skin around their eyes smooth and shiny. He hadn't noticed that earlier. The confidence at muster in Asgard's field made them all seem so much grander and stronger, but fear had a way of breaking all people down. "Watch the line and listen for command," he shouted, and the only illusion he had left was to put a courage in his voice he didn't feel. "The line holds them back. If we strike back, we wait for _our_ opportunity, not theirs!"

Metal struck metal as they reformed position. They heard him, and with another rolling, sick feeling he realized that any men that died now, their lives would be on him and his word. Beyond the gleaming white ring, he heard the snap of a leftover bone, the wet scatter of something that had once been whole inside a breathing chest. He no longer knew if he was in Muspelheim or in Hel. "We hold, and if we must, we hold until dawn to press onward!"

They roared back at him as one, thankful someone else would have to make that hard decision for them. He turned to Groa, and he knew his eyes were far too wide. "What can we do, meanwhile?"

"We're going to make wards that can travel with us, prince. If we can hold this place until dawn, it'll be enough to make some travel space around us so we can move camp." This time, Loki realized he'd been upgraded from 'boy.' She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the men, as if counting. "I've got pouches we can work. If we pace ourselves, we've power for such protection."

"Enough for all?"

Something flexed in her jaw as she kept studying the men. "No."

He realized how tense he suddenly was. "What was the original plan you had for a situation like this one, then? Wait for enough to die that we could effectively move them without killing ourselves protecting them?"

She looked at him, frank. "That is the backup plan, but not the original. I'm not that cold by nature, Your Highness. I _will_ be that cold by necessity. My original plan was to let them see what they faced, and hope that this time, wiser minds will prevail and we would not lose so many to a first strike. My hope failed when Volund struck out, poor idiot. They're all frightened now, and that fear will feed our hunters, and more will come, drawn to a good meal. The balance is tipped already, and not in our favor. I tried to warn, but as these things go, I shouted again into the wild rivers."

"We're not going to sacrifice anyone else to these things." His voice sounded shaky. He didn't like her formality with him now. It was just another kind of armor between them, and he didn't want the leadership he'd been given through her. "We're not."

"Then what do you think we can do?" She didn't sound mocking, and she didn't sound like she was testing him. "We don't have enough energy between us to save everyone, and we still need to get to the incursion point."

The idea blurted itself out before he considered all the angles to it. "There's power all around us. Under us."

Groa stared at him, waiting for him to realize what he'd said.

Loki grimaced under the weight of all the warnings he'd read. Centuries of dead sorcerers were baked into this land for the cost of their smarter ideas. "Yes, I know. But our sanctified shield is already up. We could purify the ley-"

"Which costs a greater amount of our power to do."

"But if we do, if we get a _locus_ to work, even if for just a while, if we can pour it out on our behalf, we've weaponized the land itself. Like - like filtering raw light into a rainbow. It'll be costly, yes, and it's a risk like few on their own would dare, but _if_ it works, we can just maybe do this without losing anyone else."

"And if it doesn't, prince, we all die."

"We might all die _anyway_ if we can't get enough warriors to the incursion point. It just may give us the edge. The demons won't expect it, and certainly Surtur will be infuriated, but he already is. He loathes by his own basic nature. What is there to making it worse?"

Groa studied him, glittering and blank, and it seemed like the smell of herbs around her was stronger. "Just maybe you're _too_ smart, boy," she said, and he liked her grudging, annoyed tone with him much better.

. . .

Loki's voice trailed off as he rattled the now-empty bottle of spring water.

"You're leaving me hanging here." Strange continued to lean on the side of the car, watching Loki ignore him in favor of a garbage can bolted to the empty street.

"What? What's to leave? Obviously I survived. Since Asgard survived, we must have stopped the incursion. There's no suspense left. The trick with rerouting demonic ley-lines into something malleable without burning out your own mind worked. There. _Fini_. The End."

"There's the whole bit where you trudge thrillingly towards your destination to some final conflict and some teary, heroic farewell with your new bestie, Groa. There's the bit with some final showdown with the meat grinder demon you saw."

"But there's no suspense to any of that. We did it."

Strange rolled his eyes so hard that the clouds in the sky seemed to do a barrel roll around his vision. "Okay. All right. You're definitely deliberately skipping things."

"What?" Loki whirled on him, and he was plainly angry again. The corners of his eyes were drawn white and hot. "What? What do you want to hear?" A hand came out, gesturing as if offering something to someone that wasn't there. "You want to hear that we _still_ lost ten more warriors on the march towards the point? Gradually, inescapably? That I couldn't save them, and I tried? They were pulled out of our protections, actually pulled and eaten before us, because I underestimated just how much demons could hate, how much Surtur _hated_ anyone that came into his realm, powerful enough that his demons could just sever through protections when they got thin enough, when a handful of warriors at the flank fell back just enough to be in danger because we were all weary with how much energy it took just to march, and we weren't safe. Never were. We had one good moment where I had a plan, and it worked, and it wasn't _enough_.

"What else am I forgetting? Oh, right, the bit where we get to the incursion, and there's only the two-score odd of us, and behind a dozen money-blinded mercenaries is an Elven sorcerer who's got some sort of _thing_ enslaved to him, and to this day I still can't describe it, either, and it didn't even bother to eat anyone, just outright murdered more of our soldiers while Groa tried to swallow it into the cursed ground under its own weight and fire, because nothing else could even touch it. I might have forgotten that bit."

Loki inhaled, ragged, then kept going. "I killed their sorcerer while Groa made way for me to reach him, and he'd been frozen in his age, looking younger than me. You know what that means? Most Elves when they go awry, when the magic in their blood turns to bile, they go young. The younger they are, the more potential they had when their demon-bound mentors find them. The corruption they embrace freezes them. They look more like sprites, only stranger somehow. Something brittle in the eyes. This one ended his better life when I was still learning the words you speak to sound noble at a high feast. I killed what looked like a _child_ , but he would have taken bones from my corpse's ribs for his rituals with a smile."

Strange didn't say anything to interrupt. He just watched Loki.

"We went back to Asgard when we were done. Over the bones of the sorcerer, we managed to win just enough space to call the Bifrost safely. Nine of us. Fifty three left for Muspelheim - fifty great warriors, a great lord with a hundred battles and more behind him, a prince, and a sorceress. Nine came back, and Groa told me that was a great many more than she expected. She called it a victory, if a hard one, and told me that I had done my best and more. I hated all of it. I learned my lessons on the deadened field, and my mother apologized to me even though we both knew the lessons were valuable and necessary, and seven warriors earned title and gold. All of them are dead now. Five managed to die in glorious combat over the years, all of them surprisingly young, and the other two killed themselves because, as their widows privately told me when I went to their funerals, the nightmares just wouldn't stop. Here I still am, and I suppose I sleep alright. And somewhere in Muspelheim is a demon that would still personally destroy me, should I ever see it again. Is that enough? Did you like it?"

Strange still didn't say anything.

"Damn me for trying to stop on a happier ending, right?" Loki turned away again, hiding the anger, which Strange had long ago realized was just old hurt. "What else do you want?"

"I'm sorry."

That got him a look, cold and disbelieving. "Beg your pardon, what?"

Strange shrugged, no artifice to it. "I said I'm sorry, Loki. It was not my goal to upset you further. I wanted to know what that battle cost, because that's what sorcery _is_. I haven't been at it as long as you, but I know it can get dark, and I've figured out learning from mistakes _quickly_ is valuable." He rolled his eyes up to the sky, considering whether to bring up the thing with Dormammu, but chose against it. "I wasn't looking for a happy ending, though I goaded you and that was a bit of a, well, dick move. I wanted to know what happened, so I don't misjudge these particular kinds demons myself."

"Hell happened."

"Yes. It did." Strange sighed and took his gloved hands off the roof of the car. "You know, if you actually told people these things in a more up front way, not everyone would assume within five minutes of meeting you that you're a bit of an asshole."

"Maybe I prefer it that way."

"Yeah, maybe, huh?" Strange chuckled, dour. Then he sighed. "Like I should talk."

"No _shit_." The coarse word came out in a particularly florid drawl, an absurd mix of accented nobility and raw, gutter-thief obnoxiousness.

That got Strange laughing, loud and real and honest, sagging hard against the car. A moment later, Loki couldn't quite help a snort of his own as he dug for the jingling phone in his pocket.


	7. Contagion

7\. Contagion

. . .

Loki finished transferring the new files to the tablet, not about to let Strange at his personal phone again. "Only one not accounted for who might possibly be in the region is that Stryker. And he's off the grid, so I can't even say that. Certainly not local to here. If we can't find him, I don't know that our Carter can. Unless, of course, he has some other method." He reached across the roof of the car, passing the tablet over. "Which seems increasingly doubtful."

The screen was still lit up when Strange took it, and he immediately scanned the cover document of an official autopsy report. Thorton's. "He's still local, then. Carter. He seems insistent on being on foot, and I don't find any trace of him leaving the wider area. The foot trail went to the woods, and then it seemingly went back. A loop."

"But how does he get from the woods back to the city, then? Didn't your trace find that?"

"It didn't. I had to keep it narrowly focused so I wouldn't pick up every moose in Canada. So I don't know the answer to your question." Strange frowned. "And further, where's Carter staying while he's here? Does he have a residence?"

"No, he took his severance pay and went east, into Ontario. His apartment, however, is virtually empty now. A team swept it after Coulson verified Carter's ID for us. So he's definitely here, and staying here. Somewhere." Loki froze with a blink as one answer he needed struck him. "Flatbed truck, frightened driver, close proxi-" He dug the phone right back out before he finished the rest of his thought aloud, almost snapping it at Strange. "Where the hell do they put park vehicles when they're damaged?"

"I'd imagine the park service has a designated fleet service team, or a repair shop they prefer." Strange started rubbing at his forehead, seeing what Loki had been about to point out. "If he hitched a ride back on the fleeing truck once it hit that tree, all right, first of all, that's nightmarish. Imagine that poor man, if he'd looked back at some point and saw the shivering wreck of Carter staring at him through that tiny little rear window from only about four inches away. We would have gotten our information via a psychiatrist, and really, I wouldn't have blamed him."

Loki gave him a quick look, a voice babbling at him from the phone in his hand, as if to say _why would you point that out_?

"Second of all, he could be anywhere in the…" He looked down at his autopsy notes as Loki rapped orders at someone and then hung up. He looked up again and now they were both staring at each other, slightly wild-eyed as pieces slammed into place. "I think it's just going to be an afternoon of interrupting ourselves with halfway bright ideas."

"I found the lot the truck is in, easily. They'll be waiting for us. Fleet service, east side."

"Well, I think I might have a pretty good guess where Carter is hiding out. We can check the trail from the truck, see if it runs parallel with my guess."

"What's your guess?"

"Who called in Brent Jackson's body to the police?"

Loki's lips pursed, slowly at first, then pressing and thinning into a line until they became damn near invisible. Then he pointed at the tablet now hanging limply in Strange's hands. "Put your theory of Carter's issues together and tell it to me after we examine the truck."

"I may not have all the details by then. I want to study these documents further."

"That's why it'll be a _theory_ , Strange. I'm not telling you to put your career on the line over it, I want to know what the hell you're thinking before we decide if we need to slam into a dead man's sealed house looking for who knows what. I want to know if we should be worried if Carter _bleeds_ on us, or if he's shitting demons and _that's_ why he's shaking all the time."

"…Possibly the former, though I can't rule out the latter." That got him a _look,_ withering and frozen all at once. "I don't think he's cursed into defecating demons, Loki. More seriously, I don't know your species' neurological or physical weaknesses. I'm going to err on the side of caution, and caution says there may be something dangerous here regardless of how godlike you think you are."

Loki pointed at the rental next, all prickly business. "Get in the car and put your obnoxious human brain to work."

. . .

"He was definitely in the flatbed." Strange wrinkled his nose, not quite and yet sort of smelling the ether of the trail he'd marked that morning. His eyes were unfocused, seeing the damaged park truck through a veil of mystic sight that made his eyes glimmer oddly. He was attached to the mortal plane just enough that he could still somehow _sense_ the discomfort of the nearby lot attendant without currently being able to see him. "The trail is clear. I believe I was right." He blinked himself back into the here and now and looked at the man in the dirty baseball cap, who was obviously grimacing, and then he looked at Loki, up in the flatbed, in gloves and with an evidence bag in hand, who was looking back at him as if he'd fallen straight off a turnip truck.

Loki shook the bag at him, full of leaves stained with blood, and Strange saw the toe of his shiny black shoe not quite touching a small and dried-dark stain. "You think?"

"I can at least show you where the trail went," snapped Strange, freshly nettled.

Loki turned his head painfully slowly and spoke to the lot attendant. "What did you tell me in the office a few minutes ago? Please repeat that for my _friend_."

"Uh, morning guy told me it looked like someone dropped off the undercarriage and ran off, looking like he was falling apart. I thought he was bullshitting me." The attendant reached up and tugged the cap around his head, glancing uncertainly between the two men. "He said he staggered up the street, barefoot, took a left up at the light. Said it seemed like he knew where he was going."

"Thank you," said Loki, still almost metallically calm. He hopped down with the evidence bag still clutched in his hand and swept by them both, ignoring Strange's pained expression. "The vehicle is now under SHIELD's jurisdiction, we'll have someone come by and sweep it later. Don't let anyone else mess with it now."

"Ah, yessir…. Should I tell the police that?"

The way the attendant said it made Loki pause and turn, studying him. "I was going to say _obviously_. Scratch that for tone. They've already been in contact with you?"

"Guy named McRae called a couple hours ago." The attendant looked between them again. "SHIELD outranks cops, right?"

"Depending on the case and jurisdiction. In the matter of this particular scenario, I'm prepared to claim superiority, yes." Loki took a step towards the attendant, not quite looming, but the prickle of real and abject annoyance was filling the air again. To his credit, Strange could tell he was making an effort to not direct it at the hapless attendant. "What did Superintendent McRae want?"

"Just… he asked about what we saw, said he was gonna have a guy by for a report and all that. I don't know much." The attendant looked sheepish. "Still haven't had an officer by."

"With efficiency like that, I can't imagine how he hasn't managed to sneak further past us." It came out in a deadpan. His next words were warmed, if slightly. "Thank you for the information. That's helpful."

"Yessir." The attendant stepped away from him with a cheerful enough nod.

. . .

Loki dropped his phone into his suit pocket before starting the car. "McRae isn't going to be an issue. I'll handle him when the time comes." He glanced at Strange, sidelong and wry. "I think he's trying to sweep the situation back into his own arms and bury it, undoubtedly not the first time he's tried something like this. However, he's clearly _terrible_ at interference. You might have stopped a verbal murder earlier, but all the Gods in the universe aren't going to save him next time."

"I'll summon popcorn." Strange didn't sound as enthused as he could have, normally, feeling almost joyous irritability come off of Loki in waves. He wasn't looking forward to the next question, and he braced himself for it.

"So what's your theory, Doctor?"

Strange winced. "You're going to be pissed." The car pulled down and away from the lot, moving slow as Loki examined the patterns of other cars, evening chaos began to filter into the narrow city streets. "How pissed and in what direction?"

"Well…"

. . .

Loki immediately pulled over at the way Strange had tried to dissemble, idling the rental in an alley next to a seedy-looking parking structure instead of dealing with the snarl of rush hour traffic. There wasn't a hurry yet - McRae was unlikely to have figured out Carter's backtrail, and Strange was happy enough to not combine watching Loki trying to drive in this mess with what he was about to lay out.

Strange took an experimental inhale, knowing full well that of all his flaws and somewhat better qualities, stage fright was never among them. That said, Loki was going to be a peculiar audience, and it was guaranteed to throw him off. "There are two major vectors that we're dealing with. One is whatever Stanley Carter may have been exposed to in the Department K lab, along with if that exposure left any lingering effects Thorton's team somehow didn't discover during the incident followups. The other is Thorton himself."

The keys to the car were tossed unceremoniously onto the dashboard as traffic sludged by on the main road. Loki had given up for now. "Are you going to do the build-up-to-a-point thing, too? Because I'll just throw myself in front of a semi, if you don't mind. It won't kill me, but it'll hurt less than sitting here waiting for a drawn-out explanation." Loki was staring straight ahead. "I've got that part. I was here for it. Please, it's not a seminar. There is no free buffet with shrimp toast and a simpering pharmaceutical lobbyist waiting for you."

"How do you _want_ me to explain my theory?"

"Try a simple timeline, or a list. Just… simple. Plain. Once in your godsdamned life. No ornate bullshit, Strange, not today. I'm not going to be impressed, and I'm incredibly tired with this whole thing, which is astonishing, since we haven't even been shot at once."

" _Fine_." It came out hotter than he wanted. "We've got a piecemeal set of eight years of documentation from a pack of assholes who forgot their basic medical creed. They chose to do an awful lot of harm, and I don't have a clear timeline of what happened when, so you're getting a list. That said, yes, it seems likely that Carter became potentially exposed to _something_ around the same time the Department began to decline - due to Thorton's mysterious illness." Strange inhaled. "Thorton was a world traveler, and he was also obviously a bigoted, controlling idiot with a lot of money and a series of big ideas about the world. If you're an entitled science wonk with a lot of money, you can do pretty much whatever you want on this planet. Most rich jackasses just go to Thailand and contribute to the depressingly entrenched societal problems there, then come home and make jokes about antibiotics."

Strange lifted a finger when Loki shifted. "Before you interrupt me and tell me I'm building, I know. I have a point to it, I'm not just jerking us around. I'm telling you that my own gut feeling was initially that Thorton didn't die from something as simple as Parkinson's, and the few documents your people were able to glean from his death have borne me out." He lifted more fingers as he talked, counting along. "One, they went the extra mile cleaning the workspace after his autopsy, because simple decontamination of their instruments wasn't enough. Most of the tools were destroyed and the entire autopsy room was chemically sterilized. Two, they cremated him. Probably _because_ a full autopsy was conducted, meaning it would be safer for all involved so long as no family members insisted on the alternative, in which case there would have been other restrictions. Three, he was fascinated by mutagenics. Four, he was fascinated by humans in a distant, patronizing way. Five, the one identified audio recording we got indicated he was suffering severe tremors - not unlike our Carter is, now."

He closed his gloved fist. "Finally, Thorton was an idiot. Okay, that's not final. Final is his last major world trip before he got sick was to Papua New Guinea."

"Okay. Punchline?"

"I think there's a solid chance the idiot went and got himself infected - possibly deliberately, who knows with a dead idiot - with _kuru_." Strange glanced at him, sidelong. "Which, way to go, he brought back a functionally extinct offshoot of an even deadlier brand of disease."

Loki looked at him, blank.

" _Kuru_ is a prion disease. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, although there are sporadic variants, too. Things like Creutzfeldt-Jakob and the infamous 'mad cow.' Prions are proteins in the human brain, and when they fold incorrectly, things go bad very quickly. Like a cascade fail in a computer. TSE cases are typically untreatable, except to try and make your patient comfortable before they die. I have never personally witnessed a case of prion malfunction in practice, and for that I've been grateful. Now. Post-mortem TSE requires serious care. Standard cleaning doesn't work. The CDC have a whole document on guidelines if your patient dies of a prion disease, and their directions match Thorton's odd autopsy exactly." Strange grimaced. " _Kuru_ was transmitted occasionally among the Fore people until several decades ago, via ritualistic cannibalism and possibly through open wounds when tending the body. They did it to honor their dead. They've long since stopped."

"And you think Thorton did it for his foolish idea of tourism."

"I think it's very possible. In most situations it would be an intense longshot, but here… _Kuru_ roughly translates to ' _trembling_.' It, like several of its cousins, is quite noticeable for that symptom. Among all the others that eventually lead to death." Strange looked out the window, unhappy. "If Carter became infected from Thorton, then that explains the shaking and much of the other bizarre behavior described, if not so much his own drive to cannibalism. All of this without supernatural influence, I'm afraid."

Loki didn't move, and he didn't yet seem to react to the last point. "If Thorton was cremated, we don't know if he contaminated Carter."

"Files indicate similar pattern to Brent Jackson. Police were called to discover the corpse by another party. He could have consumed his portion beforehand, and a small cut like that might be missed. Especially once they realized they had a much bigger issue with their corpse." Strange sniffed, thinking. "Usually the disease is concentrated in the brain matter, but it can still be transmitted by consumption or contact elsewhere. And the slices Carter is taking… 21 grams of meat and nothing more, the weight of the soul. Coulson stumbled on something on your call with him. He's right, it was an absolutely terrible movie. But the slices are fairly high along the side, paralleling at least one of the wounds of Christ. Stanley Carter _is_ apparently sin eating, Loki, and it seems to me that he has fully taken Thorton's sin into himself."

"And the incident he was involved with in the lab?"

"That I don't know. We'd have to ask him, if he's coherent. And he may not be. The sounds the park ranger described… loss of vocal control can be a component of such diseases. And he is undoubtedly in constant pain, enhancing the tremors. He's going to be difficult to see, depending on how advanced the disease is." Strange inhaled, long and slow, then let it go. "Assuming I am at least generally correct, Stanley Carter is a dying man."

Loki's head was now tilted back, pressed deep into the car's headrest, and his gaze was flickering along the soft ceiling of the car, rapid and assessing. "So," he said, mild and calm. "What do you think is actually on that tape from the morgue that we've been after all this time?"

Strange watched him, feeling, to his surprise, a little nervous. Something was growing in the air, some aetheric pressure. "Fifty-fifty odds, Loki. Either Carter's got some sort of other effect enhanced within him from the Department that we don't yet know about - or it was nothing more than a visual glitch caught on camera."

"And they'd be embarrassed about that, wouldn't they? Their people run around by superstition and an emotional mistake. Maybe try to bury the problem. Handle the case internally. Cover it all up before it hit the news, and withhold the tape from all other authorities. Be a righteous pain in my behind about it all." He still sounded eerily peaceful. "Fifty-fifty sounds rather forgiving, with that in mind."

"If nothing else, I accidentally nudged that Laghari correctly. This is a small but potent medical emergency. Carter needs to be handled carefully, and he will desperately need treatment before he dies. While he's been obviously committing terrible crimes, he's miserable, and quite possibly not legally in his right mind any longer. " The inside of the car was getting cold. Very cold.

"Oh, I'm sure a sensible dispatch team from the joint disease control offices could handle the aftermath just fine. SHIELD has paperwork and flowcharts and containments for almost anything you could think of." Strange watched an oddly pretty line of curving frost form on the inside of the window next to Loki's head, haloing him. The man's face was tight and dead white with anger. Loki took a soft, controlled inhale. "And of course there's perfectly ordinary, if stringent protocols for all of that, as you say."

"Loki?"

Loki exhaled a word in a language Strange didn't know, but scholastic instinct told him it could have peeled the paint off the walls of a holy church and blown out the eardrums of every nun in a five mile radius. It was the kind of low, guttural, pissed-off word that would start a bar brawl in a trashy spaceport so mindlessly violent it would force the port's security team to resort to threatening to pop the airlock in that section. A word intended to insult not only someone's mother but the shared-universe concept of nurturing itself in a way that spoke vulgarly of total debasement. And then - "Gods damn _ridiculous_ waste of my _fucking_ time."

Basic profanity seemed hilariously underwhelming in context, after that single untranslatable word, and Strange realized the choking noise in his throat was a shocked laugh trying to bubble out. The cartoony image of Scooby-Doo and the gang ran behind his eyes and he tried to quash the mental image immediately. That hearty laugh would probably get him killed right now.

Then Loki grabbed for the car keys, scraping them off the dash, glancing at the line of frost on the window as if he hadn't realized he caused that. Then he looked at Strange's choked expression as he turned the car on, still under otherwise absolutely iron control of his anger. "Yes, it's a little funny."

"Er." The laughter vanished.

"Just a little." Loki rolled his shoulders to get some of the strain out, looking at the traffic before he pulled out. Strange shifted in his seat. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You thought I was about to explode the car with us both in it?"

"Crossed my mind."

"Mine, too. I trashed half a rented room once after they put me on what turned out to be a giant ball of nothing. I was tired and I didn't handle the information well, so I had a _moment_. Coulson made me pay for it. It's insulting what they'll charge you for damaged hotel towels, to say nothing of a poorly upholstered couch." Loki sniffed. "I decided managing my anger more _healthily_ in these situations would be cheaper. It's worked all right since."

"I don't even want to know."

"Doesn't matter. Let's go kick in a door and find your sickened cannibal."

"Oh, he's _mine_ now."

"It's medical, he's yours."

"I was brought on as a supernatural consultant."

"You were brought on as a qualified medical expert who, I remind you of your own tale, specialized quite famously in neurology. Brain damaged cannibals, all you." Loki gambled his way over to the left turn lane, mild and now audibly amused. "I can still explode the car, if you'd rather."

"I _love_ brain damaged cannibals. Let's go get one."


	8. Primum Non Nocere

8\. Primum Non Nocere

. . .

Brent Jackson had once lived in a modest little ranch-style home on a cramped street full of them, a street wedged between the old and the new. A dirty fast food joint sat on the corner, and a bus stop down the way was covered in broken glass and looked seldom-used, but the home directly neighboring his had turned their front yard into a lovely, almost overflowing garden of yellow flowers, with a tall and broad-limbed tree offering pleasant shade along the sidewalk. Old homes, with old residents, and old ways of living, trying to keep pace with a city that had moved on into an iffy future.

The front door was still plastered with yellow police tape, and it didn't look disturbed despite having been there long enough to start looking dingy and old. Loki jogged by it once to do recon, wearing an illusion that put him in the _dim_ , a figure not meant to be noticed, but if he was, all anyone saw was a tracksuit yuppie trotting down the way to the sound of a garbled soft bop coming off the phone in his hand.

The sight him like that had put Strange into a roar of laughter that Loki took with quiet enough grace, before gently suggesting the former doctor would be much more believable as a jogger than he, except for the bit where Loki was going to break both of his legs if he didn't stop laughing like that.

Strange had, in fact, shut up. But he immediately resumed snickering once Loki was up and around the curve of the sidewalk, putting the visual memory in the laugh bank for all time. He was straight-faced when Loki came back, because he wasn't entirely a fool. "Anything?"

"I faintly sense life inside. If there's been a break in, however, it's around the rear." Loki was back in his suit, easily shifting his appearance. "Some of these houses have cellar doors, and not a few are fenced 'round there. I took a glimpse coming back from the far end. Unsurprisingly, Jackson's house, him being ex-security, is one of these. Carter would use the protections of his own house against him, and he would no doubt do his best to remain unnoticed since."

"So what do we do?"

"Well, Strange, we're not living in a cop show and I don't want every old man on the street gawping at us from his lawn." Loki shoved his hands in his pockets, regarding the dead man's house at the far end of the lane. He gestured at Strange to follow him with a jut of his chin, using his elbow to chivvy the man along. "So you're going to make us both invisible, because I don't feel like taking on the energy expenditure for once, and we're going to walk up and around the house, and then we're going to casually enter through the back once I magic the lock open."

. . .

That was exactly what happened. To Strange's minor and silent disappointment, the bust kept _not_ being like the cop shows he knew so well. There was no SWAT-style sweep from corner to corner with a firearm in the down and ready position, no mics, no door-kicking, no shouting. Instead, he kept them both veiled while Loki walked ahead of the pair, gliding with casual arrogance through the mud room with its back door and cellar access, into a little hallway that opened to the garage, and then the kitchen, where there were traces of fast food rubbish and the relics of a successful series of dumpster dives.

Strange watched Loki take in the evidence with a glance, his own nose telling him the same thing Loki found - fresh enough food. No sign of the squatter yet, however.

They held fast in the kitchen for a moment, Loki listening to the silence of the home and the occasional creak, looking at the other two hallways that led off from the living area. Then he chose one, still moving in that silent and catlike way he had, the other sorcerer following close in his wake.

Down this hall were the doors to two rooms and a bathroom. The one Loki was charging towards was the one further back, with a small light on inside. By the first glance at the piles of paper near the door frame, he realized it had to be either a study or a home office.

Loki stopped just before the door, his hand coming up to keep Strange where he was. He leaned his head forward, assessing the room. Strange saw the long shadow of a writhing figure inside. It froze when Loki snapped his fingers - and as Loki had clearly expected, the figure of Stanley Carter slammed against a window that was no longer going to open for him.

"We're not police," said Loki, mild, not yet moving again. "And we're not from the Department."

The sounds of the struggle inside seemed to slow down. Strange glanced at the side of Loki's face.

"I'm with SHIELD. I know you are aware of the organization. I have a doctor, a neurosurgeon with me who claims he has deduced what is wrong with you. I'm not interested in hurting you, Carter. We have questions, that's all."

Strange heard the breathing of the man inside, low and ragged, occasionally pausing as if fighting his own lungs. He probably was. It hurt to hear that. _Former_ might be the right word to add before Loki's description of him, but right or wrong, he'd been a doctor to his bones. In the end, part of what still drove him as a person when the money and the fame was stripped away, was wanting to help.

Loki glanced back at him, waiting. Strange realized why. "Mr. Carter? My name is Stephen Strange. I used to practice neurology in New York."

The response came back, raspy and full of stutters. A wounded voice. "H-h-heard of you."

"You presented with symptoms not long after you… visited Professor Andre Thorton?"

"He…h-he wasn't moving much. Dying. Still…" the voice trailed off. Strange heard raw emotions in that voice, wobbly and hurting. "Felt-t-t-t shaky few w-w-w-weeks later."

"And that was about ten months ago."

"Y-y-y…" Coughing took the voice over, filled it with gasping and shudders instead.

Strange looked at Loki, saw a calm and steady mask. Loki seemed content to let him mostly handle this part. "You're very strong to have survived this long without treatment, Mr. Carter."

A small whine, not quite fearful. "I'm g-gggg-ggoing to d-d-d-d-ie."

Loki spoke up again, his firm voice not barging in. "Mr. Carter, we need to know what you've been doing and why. I'm not going to bargain over that. There is no point in torturing you with something you've already been suffering, and I have no interest in needless cruelty. The doctor will see to it that whatever can be done to make you comfortable _will_ be done. But so that nothing else like this happens, such as what Thorton was doing to people under his 'care,' I would like to be able to take that information back to my organization."

"H-h-h-hurts… to t-t-t-talk."

"I'm sure." Loki glanced at Strange. "It is then oddly fortunate that your situation and trail drew a pair like us. If you will attempt to work with us, there is a way to show us what you suffered, without doing you any further harm."

Strange arched an eyebrow, understanding what he was getting at though he'd hadn't yet seen a spell quite like it. "Full illusory reconstruction of a mindscape?"

Loki winced at the architectural-style description but let it go this time. "Yeah, that. Takes a little setup, but seems simpler for all of us, considering. I can arrange the ritual while you formally examine the fellow. Although I think you're fairly well convinced."

"Just by his voice and the shadow, I do indeed feel more confident about my potential diagnosis." Strange knew how his face must look.

"Well, let's do this properly." Loki raised his voice. "Mr. Carter? May we come in?"

"…Y-e-e-es."

. . .

Strange was not a hunter. Other doctors liked the irony of chasing big game, but that hadn't ever been his style. Still, he knew than when a lion goes maneater, it is often because it is sick and injured, and often preys on creatures it thinks are sick and injured. Not because of cruelty and malicious intent, but because that was all that was left to the lion to survive. Strange had seen Loki's list of Department K workers. Not all of them that ever were associated with Thorton had been killed, of course. The handful out in the woods, Jackson, Thorton himself… they had all been older men. Likely many of them had been sick. Hard to tell from corpses, but Strange could trust his instincts. Carter was a man limited by his body, when it came to what harm he could do.

That meant the first look he took at Stanley Carter was an awful one, despite his mental preparation. It struck bone inside his chest, rattled his own mind, and was promptly followed by the bleak and aching empathy of a country doctor. Grizzled old-timers who didn't care who their patients were or what they'd done, just that they needed care. _Look what you've survived, man_.

Somewhere in the shadow of the man before him was someone else, a middlingly tall figure with a solid frame, whose facial structure told of good, hearty, New York Italian stock. But that wasn't what stood in front of Strange now. Carter's hair was flopped and strung over a skull so bony and sharp with the trembling and lack of sleep that he saw in the lines of the dead pale cheeks the terrifying 'thing' the park ranger had seen between the trees in the middle of a cold and eerie night. It made for a profile that looked painfully less than human in the shadows, and achingly human in the light. Carter rocked slightly as he propped himself against a desk that had once belonged to Brent Jackson, and every part of his body was constantly in motion. It looked like a rippling shudder, something alien trapped under his skin, but the sunken eyes, when Strange looked into them, were sad and mortal.

By the way his skin seemed to hang, Carter had lost a lot of weight, and swiftly. Ten months. Prion diseases, particularly _kuru_ , tended to move through their initial stage in about a year. After that… the downhill slide of the disease was quick, and just as irrevocably fatal as it was before. Strange didn't need a battery of scientific tests to know how the brain was going to look. He'd read the papers, seen the essays. He didn't want to see for himself, though he would have to check during his own brand of magical and mundane examination. Some things of the mundane world were too awful.

 _We are a resilient species_ , he thought to himself. _But sometimes that just isn't enough_.

"Mr. Carter," he said instead, that smooth and practiced cadence coming back like an old pair of shoes. "Let me help you to a seat. I'm going to do a basic examination, and then, well. In a while I'll do a slightly more unusual one. None of it invasive, and none of it harmful."

Carter didn't try to speak. He meekly accepted being led to an empty chair on the far side of the room while Loki examined the stacks of old files that made strange pillars along the walls. Many of them were stamped with patterns. Strange couldn't make heads or tails of it, but clearly Loki had put it together. "Not all of this is Jackson's," he said out loud, not looking for a response. He already had his answer. "You didn't just take a cut of flesh. You took their papers where you could, hoarding them here. The remnants of evidence of what the Department had been doing."

Strange glanced into Carter's eyes as the man tried to make a nod more apparent through the arrhythmic trance of his trembling. "I-i-i-i-i-i never-r-r wanted to hu-u-u-urt."

"But something drove you to?"

Another trembling nod when Loki glanced at him. Strange kept doing what he needed, checking vitals - palpitations with an elevated heartbeat, odd breath sounds, persistent sweating, heightened temperature - and let the man sit. To the two of them, he was no threat. Those glassy but alert eyes watched Loki as he moved carefully around the room, and Strange could 'smell' what he was doing. A small area to work in, but then, he doubted they'd have to move much.

One thought struck him as he left his hand gently on the man's shoulder. "Does Carter have to see what we see?"

"No. All I need is that he is fairly close."

Strange saw the question try to shiver through Carter's face. "Magic," he said, knowing that wasn't quite a useful explanation. "The agent and I are also sorcerers." Carter looked uncomfortable in a way Strange saw on a hundred hospital clergy faces, but he didn't try to argue. Maybe the fact that they hadn't come in guns blazing really had been enough to assure him of their intent. Strange glanced at Loki, thinking about that. Some subtlety had use, he supposed. Then he realized he didn't recognize what the man was doing. "What sort of ritual is this?"

Loki was just finishing creating a shimmering 'shard' of magic, iridescent and pure, leaving it in the center of the room as if it were a projector. Strange realized that was basically exactly what it was. "It's… well. It's a simplified iteration of an old artifact I saw in use once. That was a lens, a magical focus that pulled a lot of memories out to be studied." He paused. Strange could tell he was wrestling with how much to say. "I was in Jotunheim, actually. Very old _seidr_ work. The shaman Queen used it on my behalf. But I thought it was fascinating, naturally, so it's been something I've had on my mind for a while as an adaptive project. Bring it up to date." The next, muttered almost awkwardly. "Didn't think I'd find a use for it so soon."

Strange knew through a few asides he probably wasn't supposed to overhear what a reference to Farbauti, the Jotun Queen, actually meant, but he was also smart enough to not press on that too much. He went for diplomacy. "Rather intriguing, actually. Have you been documenting the process?"

"Of course."

"Wouldn't mind reading that when it's in a solid place."

Loki grimaced in a particularly annoyed way that somehow got across that he was actually secretly pleased by the subtle compliment. "I'll have a few more studies to do after this surprise bit of field work pans out. Then I can collate the papers into a new grimoire."

Strange nodded and turned back to Carter. "Are you all right with this?"

The nod was hesitant but strong enough through his tremors.

"All right," said Strange, and he turned the chair around so Carter wouldn't have to witness his own memories.

. . .

"Bonus, I also put up a bit of a sound barrier. He won't have to hear his memories, either." Loki was manipulating the crystal he'd made with a few subtle gestures of his hands as the room around them seemed to spin into almost velvety black. "I just… there. Not too difficult, they're constantly on his mind. Like cream to the top."

Strange looked around, jerking a little on instinct as a piece of wall floated through him as the memory shard calibrated itself to fit the space they were using. He opened his mouth to say something he'd noticed about the crystalline structure of the ritual itself, when he was interrupted by a ghostly voice.

"Carter, get the fuck out of there." Brent Jackson popped into view, already an older man, salt and pepper hair cut military short. He looked translucent, the entire memory painted soft enough to make Strange's eyes fight for details. He realized that was another aspect of Carter's ruined brain - even if he'd had a mind as photographic as Strange's, it was weakening now. Pieces were getting lost. Loki's hands wove through the air, stringing slips of the past together as best he could.

Carter's protest came from inside the steel and concrete wall, echoing through time. "There's a wire popped-"

"I don't care, we're not engineering. We're security, and you fucking around with that is violating it."

"It's a two second repair, Brent, and it goes directly to the gr-" It faded, becoming unintelligible.

"Bit early, there." Loki's hands waved expertly, bony and light in the unnatural gleam of the faded memories. "Just… later that night."

Fluttering back into view, Carter gave the wall he'd just been toying with a sneer as he patrolled by. Lights suddenly brightened and then dimmed, and Strange thought the spell was breaking before he realized Carter was reacting to the brown-out. "God _damn_ it, I told Brent the grid was going to be affected."

The electricity flickered again, and something slammed against a door just out of sight. "Hey!" came a shout from elsewhere far down the hall. "Hey, secure those doo-"

 _Help us_

In the memory, Carter jerked. The sorcerers felt the words like a shiver, knowing they hadn't been spoken aloud. They thrummed through the illusion, almost physical enough to be part of the now.

 _Help us they're breaking us_

Strange winced as the thrumming pressure seemed to increase.

The memory followed Carter as he came up to the door, filling the memory with a kind of presence, a light that burned the memory with afterimages. Carter reached out to touch the door, and they knew because he had known, because of the brownout, and because of the busted wiring, the door fell open under his hand.

Carter saw a child on the cot inside, and the side of the boy's face was slack, the eye empty and staring. Stroke, realized Strange. Something already tearing apart inside the brain. "Hey, kid," said Stanley Carter, and his voice shook. "I'm not supposed to be in here."

The boy looked at him, and his half-face seemed made of countless layers, each one showing shards of a different emotion. Some of them were screaming. The pressure filled the air again. _We're falling apart._

"Kid-"

 _He took us and we're falling apart. We wanted our mommy, but we can't feel her. We wanted our daddy, but we think he's gone_.

"Kid, I can't be in here!" Carter seemed to be struggling, wanting to leave, unable to. Strange could almost smell the burnt components of the camera inside the little ward. No wonder Coulson's contact wasn't sure of what happened in this room. No one was, except for the one man that had been there.

 _This wasn't what was supposed to happen!_ The force of the kid's psychic wail made Carter sag against the wall, his nose bleeding. _None of this was supposed to happen! This isn't the way the world is supposed to be for us!_

Carter reached up to grip his head, felt himself pulled forward by the child, whose hands were reaching for him, grasping for him. "No, please-"

The boy touched him, and Carter couldn't even scream. He went limp, a rictus tearing across his face. The memory image shimmered, broke, reformed, and the sorcerers both winced, trying to gather what more they could in a second of memory that seemed to stretch for hours. Shrieks of grief and guilt attached themselves to the faces of the men that had been studying the boy on the cot. Misery and the needle. Miles of hospital tubing and medical readouts that were arcane even to Strange. With it, hate and anger and despair swirling like a firestorm.

"David," gasped Carter, his hands still entwined with the child's, his brain full of his memories. "Your name is David."

 _My name was supposed to be legion_ , thought the boy in a flare of torture, and Carter felt him die. Strange watched it happen, recognizing the signs. Carter felt his own heart stop for a second, felt the stroke finish killing the child's brain, and he knelt there by the cot, slack, his face not halved but full of the absolute agony of the child's short life under the roof of Department K. He knew it all. He was going to carry it all.

"Legion," said Carter, hollow. "Oh, no." And then he put his face in his hands and wept.

There was nothing else necessary for them to see.

. . .

"And so, touched by what he, perhaps now a little madly, thought was a devil tormented too deeply by other and worse devils, Carter set about wondering how to right the sins he had seen and felt for himself." Strange sagged against the desk in the fading velvety dark, sensing they were still within a little circle that kept Carter from overhearing them both. Melancholy threatened to choke him. "Jesus."

"Nice choice of words." Loki examined the crystal, seeing fragments of the aftermath - Brent Jackson coming in with Stryker himself to examine the aftermath. "And these idiots, they didn't have the tools to look for psychic damage. Which ultimately became something more psychological. An insurmountable impulse, to act on the behalf of his faith."

"A devil knows how to hide inside the soul, they say." Strange sighed. "Not that this poor boy was any devil. It may be he was the closest thing the Department ever had to a success, and they immediately destroyed him in the process. And Carter. And ultimately themselves, through Thorton's foolishness and arrogance."

"An actual tragedy, full and formless and with a bitter ending for all involved." Loki's crystal dimmed under his hand, and then splintered into air and nothingness. Dry, he said, "At least I know the ritual works."

Strange glanced at him, saw on the pale face that the minor sorcerous victory wasn't actually the dominant thing on his mind. "He collected the papers, though. Whatever evidence he could gather."

"What happens to sin-eaters, in this old folklore you know about?"

"Often they died homeless and poor, sometimes just as they started, full of all the sins of others they took on, and left with no soul of their own."

"Your human religions stink."

Strange felt the mother of all eye rolls coming on, went with it, embraced it, even added a theatrical groan of raw annoyance to really underline it. "That seems like an _excessively_ simple overreaction to the breadth and intricacy of the world's concepts and faith. It ignores so much."

Loki snorted. "It was meant to be dismissive sarcasm, it's not necessarily what I think. But I'm also not going to get into a theological debate right now, and certainly not with you. All right, let me trim this down into something closer to what I actually mean. _That particular bit of folklore_ seems simplistic and cruel and ironically deeply selfish. Can't be bothered to address your own flaws before death, get a poor sot to take them on so you can skate into the afterlife on a _technicality_."

"That, I won't argue." Strange looked at the slouched back of Carter, thinking and leaving all his thoughts to himself. "We need to clean up our loose ends here, I suppose. Call your people to gather the papers. Do the outtake, etcetera."

"Yeah. I'll get on that as soon as I take down the silence. Do you need medical called in for Carter?"

Strange licked his lips, watching the man - not a monstrous cannibal now, not just a murderer who believed what he did was necessary for salvation not only for himself but for a boy named David, but a victim in his own right. _Do no harm_. "I'm going to work with him for another moment, if you will."

. . .

"Casual glance tells me we've got at least a decade's worth of paper from Thorton's associates here. I'm sure your contact and his friends can do something with all of this." Loki sighed. "As for Carter himself, I'd call it an inflicted insanity case. It's complicated. I'll sort it out on the final paperwork. He's responsible, and would tell you so himself, but in fuller context, it's hard to not have a little sympathy." Loki glanced back at Strange as he talked to Carter in a low voice, furrowing his brow. "No, at the moment I'm deferring to him. I don't know what he's going to recommend. I gather there's not a lot of good options with this particular medical issue, plus with the psychic and mental complications in mind, I'm not comfortable just blurting out an answer for you. Yes, I know. Even me."

Loki paused to listen to Coulson's responses, turning away again and letting his gaze roam over the papers. Enough here to build a full profile of organizations like K. Enough to identify no few future idiots fitting themselves into the cracks of governments and medical networks. He thought Coulson might agree that was a better application of absolution than the small but symbolic acts of cannibalism that had ultimately helped to drive Carter mad. Something that would linger.

Coulson asked him a question. He almost missed it, thinking about how there seemed to be no few of these kinds of fools on Earth, trying to remake the world to their own design. There were fools in the galaxy, even. Perhaps the universe entire. It made him weary. "I don't know. I'll deal with local enforcement. There's been some interference." He listened again, bemused. "Oh, gods. Well, at least there's that. Daisy is nothing if not persistent." He hung up and turned around.

Strange had his rump leaned against the windowsill, looking mournful and also prepared for a fight. And Carter was no longer softly shaking in his chair. Loki looked at them both, and immediately understood what had happened while his attention was elsewhere. He slowly put his phone away into his pocket, and his question was quiet. "What would have happened to Carter if we put him in a proper hospital?"

Strange paused, visibly surprised at the lack of a hostile address, collecting himself. "I took a quick magical scan with his permission. His brain is… He was further advanced than I initially guessed, already transitioning into the second stage of the disease. As it progresses, the tremors become more pronounced. He would become immobile, deeply depressed, and there would be other neurological symptoms that he would become unable to control. Then he would slide further. Malnutrition becomes unavoidable in the final stage. His body, already no longer operated by an intact mind, would begin to deteriorate in full. Ulcerations occur. Infections rise, which may or may not cut his life a merciful trace shorter with their fever. And so, within perhaps another year or so, he would die senseless and unaware, having lived his last few months feeling, hopefully, nothing but the fog granted by the medications given to try and cut even a _fragment_ of his pain."

Loki nodded, and he considered his own recent memories. "Then this was better. I assume he agreed freely to your gentler solution."

Strange jerked, startled by the casual acceptance of what he'd done. Then he nodded back, a question of his own on his face.

Loki could guess what it was. "This is not up for discussion. I don't mean in the casual 'you can eventually force it out of me by being a clever arse' sort of way. I mean the question on your mind will not be brought up in my hearing anytime soon. I'll explain what's happened to Coulson. I think there will be few consequences." He paused. "As I told him, I was deferring to you medically. I expect he will see the results similarly."

The phone in his pocket rang again a moment later, soft but insistent. Loki fished it back out and looked at the number. Then the smile came back to his face, almost feral, all hunger, and loaded with white teeth. A shark's broad and chainsaw smile, as if the water around it had just filled with fresh chum. "Why, lucky lucky me. It's _McRae_."


	9. Epilogue: Shaggy Dog Story

Epilogue: Shaggy Dog Story

.

"I don't want to watch the damned thing, Loki. We already know." Strange threw the videotape back at the grinning man, not budging from where he was flopped on an ugly couch shoved along the back wall of SHIELD's informal lounge area. "It was bullshit, in a certain way. It was one of your Scooby-Doos, although in the end I'd argue with some strength that we were the right assholes for the job anyway. It's going to be a visual glitch. And I don't know why your people put it on a damn VHS."

Loki waggled the tape at him, delighted, his sarcasm all but dripping. The answer to Strange's question was Daisy thought it was fitting, muttering something about some other horror movie Loki hadn't recognized. Whatever. "But aren't you the Sorcerer of Supreme Closure, the man that wants the end of all tales told to you whether they're terrible tales or not?"

"I can see it's going to be a decade before you let that go."

"Better believe it. Anyway, Miss Johnson went to war to get us this thing, probably a story all its own. Probably worth watching it just for her sake, not to mention the bit where she seemed insistent that we do. And not only all of that, she apparently also gained SHIELD a new employee. Stole him right out of the ranks of the Winnipeg police."

"Yeah?" Strange lifted his head to look at him.

"Someone named Panadis. I suppose we do need more people on the ground out there again. He took the recording from lockup and uploaded it for her, on the promise of us, and I am now quoting, 'getting me the hell out of this shithole job.'" Loki grinned again. "Which is understandable, although I think the department reorganization going on now might have been equally beneficial to him if he'd chosen to stick it out."

"You were, ah, a little hard on McRae." The can of epic hell and fury Loki had dumped on the interfering cop had been awe inspiring to behold. Strange was fairly sure the man had been crying before Loki was through with him, and that had just been the _phone call_. The followup was worse - six different internal investigations had been immediately launched about how McRae was handling his Winnipeg force, and ' _someone_ ' had dumped a few leading clues about his mistreatment of First Nations citizens into the hands of one of the city's better investigative journalists in the last couple of days. His wife had also left him, and she wasn't speaking to anyone about why.

McRae, not to put it lightly, was _fucked_.

"Ask me how much I care about Former Superintendant McRae's wounded feelings. Go on, ask me. I need the laugh. Anyway, the tape." Loki waggled it again.

Strange arched an eyebrow, still refusing to budge from the couch. The matter had been mostly over for a week, but he was back tonight for final debriefs and to benefit from someone's rumor that tonight was pizza night. It had actually turned out to be a nearly buffet-style mess of Chinese take-out with the leftovers now currently threatening to explode the lounge fridge, but he'd been all right with that, too. He was full of curried street noodles, and the world was quiet for once. "I'd rather watch a bad rental. Maybe something with that Gerard Butler in it. Poor guy. Terrifically shit movies."

"It's a five minute tape. We're watching it."

Strange made a dramatic retching noise into his empty mug of bad SHIELD lounge tea as Loki commanded the TV to connect to the ancient tape machine without bothering to physically mess with the dusty hookups. An understandable use of magic, in Strange's opinion. He'd done similar to a turntable over the summer, got the old Doors tunes he'd grown up with banging nicely through the Sanctorum.

. . .

[ _Five minutes of compiled video, in color, sound muffled due to the placement of the camera behind a sheet protective glass. A young man in a crinkled lab coat lets go of the device that activates the camera. His face is half-slack, deeply tired, but his hands prepare autopsy instruments with automated deftness. One scalpel tries to drop off the side of his work table. He catches it out of the air before it can clatter to the floor with a muttered 'motherfuck' barely caught on the recording. He moves to the wall of the dead, finds the small square door labeled JACKSON, B, marked also with the date of discovery, and pulls it out of its cubby to get it to the autopsy table._

 _"Brent Jackson, age 67," begins the tech. The beep of his watch is also picked up by the camera. "Shit," he says, looking at his wrist. "I thought I had more time before break." He taps at the camera control, the practiced motion of his hands showing that he thinks he's turned off the device, and he snaps his latex gloves back off._

 _The attendant leaves. The time on the stolen tape says one hundred and thirty nine seconds have passed._

 _There is thirty seconds of an empty room, cut down from a much longer gap._

 _A shadow slips into the autopsy room, vague and fuzzy and jerking around. The camera does not pick up his face. The figure, shaking oddly, comes quickly into view and takes up the scalpel that almost fell. A device is set down on the edge of the autopsy table. It is a small kitchen scale, a common model found in big box stores. He works quickly, forcing his hand to be steady long enough to make the cuts he wants, high along the side of the corpse. He weighs fastidiously, then cuts just a fragment more and weighs it as well._

 _Apparently satisfied, the figure consumes this second, smaller piece, shivering all the while._

 _A second shadow appears in the doorway. The figure grabs the scale and immediately turns to run as the returning attendants starts to shout. The camera gets a single second glance at the three-quarters profile of the figure, who departs past the still-flailing attendant, who is now screaming for security and yelling a garbled mix of obscenities. The attendant sags against the glass pane a moment later, wobbling it._

 _The camera picks up three seconds of a multicolored shimmer above the corpse, a rainbow of orb-like objects that seem to form, create a pattern with no meaning, and then disappear again. They are varying shades of green and blue, and seem almost physical._

 _The attendant, on the other side of the glass from the camera, yells again at seeing the phenomena, and runs from the room._

 _There is five seconds of an empty autopsy room._

 _The video ends.]_

. . .

Neither sorcerer said anything at first. Loki sat with the remote pinched between the knees of his black jeans, staring at the black screen of the TV. Next to him, Strange was blinking at slow, regular intervals. Sitting on the edge of the couch was Agent Daisy Johnson, munching on a bag of baked pita chips. She'd wandered in a few seconds before Loki hit PLAY on the tape, and promptly took her perch without saying a word.

"Er," managed Loki, after a pause pregnant enough to leave a litter of befuddled kittens behind.

"Uh," added Strange.

"Yeah, so, what the hell, guys?" Daisy crunched on a chip, looking contemplative. "I actually watched the thing with Coulson when we finally got it in, but we didn't want to say _anything_ until you two got a look at it. Fresh eyes, you know. This is your department."

"Well." Loki swallowed before reaching over to snag some chips out of the bag, past Strange's face. "It's… definitely… something."

"Never seen anything like that." Strange started to tilt his head, heading for a ninety degree angle, looking for all the world like a deeply confused owl. "Certainly wasn't any trace of it when we investigated."

"No, nothing remaining in the aether. Jackson's corpse was magically inert." Loki shook his head. The handful of chips in his hand seemed almost instantly forgotten. "I- we assumed it was going to be a visual glitch."

"Attendant's second freakout puts paid to that."

Daisy gestured at the TV with the bag. "So what the hell _is_ it? Why did it happen? Did Carter somehow do that?"

"I…" Strange frowned. "I mean, we don't know everything he had been… well… infected with by the deceased boy, that David. I was under the impression it was mostly an unintended psychic attack. _Maybe_ it's some aspect of the boy's spirit. I don't know." He sagged back into the couch, realizing he was actually a little irritated with himself. "I genuinely do not know."

Loki crunched down on a pita chip, looking almost depressed.

"Guess they didn't hide the tape just to keep from looking like a bunch of idiots freaked out by a recording error." Daisy rolled the bag sealed. "So maybe they hid it to keep us from looking too close?"

"Possible now that someone did. A good dose of weirdness does seem to make SHIELD show up like the words _open bar_ at a wedding." Strange stole a pita chip from Loki's palm as if it were a snack bowl. Loki didn't seem to notice. "Someone didn't want us to come look at this particular situation. The outsider guess takes the lead."

"But the story got out, anyway, and it was still enough to get us out there. That's even weirder, kinda."

"How _did_ SHIELD get the call?" Strange straightened up enough to look at Daisy.

"Tip line. Or, really, tip email. Our own version of SecureDrop. We've got a whole routine that weeds out the pointless stuff, make sure it passes the smell test, so the tip had enough meat on it to make it into the incident briefings." She thought. "I don't know what it was in this case, Coulson might, but there would have been actual names mentioned that our people would have checked. Plus verifiable information to follow up on. Maybe some documentation attached. Something that got it zoomed through with a flag."

"It wasn't that Panadis?"

She shook her head. "No, he didn't know what was going on until he wound up on highway dragnet duty and one of his dick coworkers hinted it up."

Loki looked at her, then at Strange, and his voice was hollow gravel. "…Why do I feel like we were _baited_?"

"Cuz you're a paranoid." Daisy shook the crackly bag at him, cutting the freshly nervous mood before it took hold. "Look, whatever it was, it got you guys out there to take care of a situation that needed you two in particular, badly. That's the important part. Whether you want to call it one of your Scoobies or not, Carter needed to be found, and he needed a doctor, and the magic you guys use really helped. What the Department actually did had to be seen. And whatever Thorton wanted it all to mean, well, now it's gonna be more ways to stop a-holes like him." She got off the couch and said the rest over her shoulder. "I call that a win."

Strange waited until she was gone. "She has a pretty good point."

Loki tossed the remote onto the table and dropped his head onto the back of the couch, staring at the ceiling. "It's part of why I deign to put up with these people."

"Asshole," Strange said jovially.

"Go home, _Doctor_ Strange. Nobody here likes you." He rolled his head over when the other sorcerer got up. "Don't forget your leftovers."

"Hey, thanks."

"I'm not being kind. Curry makes the fridge reek if you leave it." Loki casually left out the fact that he liked curry a great deal. "I'll let you know when I've finished the memory thesis."

Strange made a small snort, neither approving nor disapproving, and then he left Loki alone, in the heart of SHIELD's hidden base.

"Guess I choose to put up with you, too," muttered Loki, still pretending to be annoyed. "Arrogant bastard."

He realized there were pita chips left in his hand, and he munched them, quiet and content, at the end of a job well done.

. . .

She picked her way carefully through the torn-up room as she studied what was left around the cowl of the pretty blue silk veil she had chosen for tonight. She had a delicate gait that looked timid in passing, but was really just the gentle steps of a half-ghost, fitting for who she was. Her odd mortal friends were allowed to call her Salima, and there was a piece of humanity inside of her that held all the memories of a girl who had been named that, but she was also Death.

Death made her way back to the dead man laying in the center of the room like a sacrifice, smiling. His final frenzy of destruction wouldn't amount to much. It was simply the act of the desperate, a thing she had seen many times before, and her mortal friends would know all the ways to counter it. The information William Stryker had tried to destroy along with himself would be reclaimed and used, and she was pleased to know this.

Death, being Herself, could look into the eyes of the dead and know many things, just as she did when she looked into those very eyes at the moment of their birth. She knew, for example, that while Stryker lived very far away from where Department K had been sheltered, and very far away from where most of his ex-accomplices had lived in Winnipeg, he also had an old friendship with a man in that city named McRae. And it had been a terribly easy thing, then, for Stryker to ask a favor of McRae whenever word came that other old friends, old accomplices had died - and then, eventually, Brent Jackson, too.

Well, none of _that_ was any good. Death was meant to be neutral, because all life believed her to be so, but in truth, Mistress Death had a few sensible preferences - such as a great dislike for abhorrent misuses of the gift of life, as Thorton had given his own such warped life to study. She had been content to see how fate had paid him back, though she had also felt immediate pity for Carter.

So Jackson had died, and of course she had been there, and Carter was there as well, being that he had killed Jackson with all the memories of David, who knew he should have been born and named a legion, eating him up inside along with Thorton's diseased fire. Poor Carter, already broken when she passed by him with little David's frightened hand in hers.

She put her finger on Stanley Carter as he left Jackson behind to hide, as he waited for a better time to call the police, and she gave him a little gift to carry for the right moment to come. A moment when he'd be in the room with the body of Jackson again, because she knew he would be. It would be a simple signal, a flare, meant to get the _right_ kind of attention.

And Stryker, of course, had tried to circumvent her little game, in a panic of his own, because everyone likes a good, juicy story and he knew it would get out. In the end, she, with the memories of sleeping Salima egging her on more than a little, wrote up a clever whistleblower's email as well, and sent it off just as she'd been told by her mortal friends once how to do. As a bonus to her interference, she'd gotten Strange's house to herself for a few days, as she still liked to stay there to be quiet and think about these mortal lives.

Who would ever think Death would write an email? Death laughed, quiet and cheery, in the silent house of the newly dead, and she looked at the bloody spray that dead William's head had left behind, and she looked at the oily gun still in his hand, and she considered calling him in, too.

No, she decided. There was no need for her to interfere any further. She was skating around her own rules enough as it was, for the sake of kindness and those gentle mortal memories and her dislike of atrocity. And besides, she knew her friends would find this old dead man soon anyway. They were clever people. She liked them a great deal, and was glad to know many of them would someday walk with her to the end of the mystery knowing they could be unafraid of her.

Death reached down to Stryker and took something from his pocket. It was a little glass vial, no longer than two inches, and it contained a few strands of hair. Fewer than it had held, once. With her good, immortal's eyes, she could see them well in the glass, and remembered the lost boy they had belonged to. His name had been Jason, and he had been born with something wrong with him. Something frightening enough that it changed Stryker, and driven him towards men like Professor Thorton so that he could learn to be less frightened. That had never paid off for him, no wise investment had he found among these broken men.

Meanwhile, well, poor Jason had died quickly of the disease that ran through him like wildfire, but he also hadn't died as the person he might have been, had things been just a little different.

She tilted the vial in her hand and let it catch the light, and in it she saw the dormant DNA, and the changes, and all the potential mutation that simply didn't exist in this universe, and she sighed, a little forlorn. It was so easy to see change happen, and just as easy for it never to be. It was a world of magic and miracles she walked in, where strangeness happened every day - but the key of this particular kind of mutation never turned in the lock, and it was never going to be fully understood why that was.

Sometimes when Death slept, more for the enjoyment of sleep than for needing it, she dreamed, and in those dreams were other universes. Real ones, in their way, all of them spun out like dewy charms on a forever web. In some of them, change woke in the blood, and with that blood, humankind changed, too.

It wasn't better than the one she now walked in, really, but it was different, and she liked knowing that could be out there, too.

She put the vial of a lost boy's hair in the pocket of her coat and moved on to the next place that needed her. After all, Death decided, it was always good to leave a little bit of mystery behind.

 _~Fin_

 _Strange days have found us_

 _And through their strange hours_

 _We linger alone_

 _Bodies confused_

 _Memories misused…_

 _~ The Doors, Strange Days_

11/2/17, all relevant rights to Marvel with no infringement intended. Double blame goes to the black suited bastard and the grinning ex-doctor.

Notes:

There's a lot of real world complexity to why we have several different 'MCUs,' in that Spider-Man was in a different one until very recently (and bits of him still are?), parts of Hulk were in another, Netflix TV seems to be brushing very close against the veil, and now we have the Hulu-verse, and ABC's exiled Agents, and, of course, the X-Men and all their fellows, such as Deadpool, off in their own little pocket universes.

It's pretty obvious that in general, Inhumans and experimentation and magic and just all sorts of interesting weirdness replaced the mutant gene in the MCU we often consider the main one. But it still leaves a lot of holes, and a lot of empty places, and it leaves a place to ask, in terms of the fiction, why. And the answer, I thought, could be fairly simple - and also subtly horrible. The mutant gene simply never woke up, and won't fully wake up, no matter what is done to it to try and control it. Wanda's comic book wish of No More Mutants fully succeeded in this one fictional reality. There never was a place for the X-Men in 'our' MCU, and the way things stand with the various studios, there probably never will be.

(This should never stop fanfiction. It must never. I am here for your Hugh Jackman Wolverine crossovers existing, even and especially the filthy ones.)

So I wanted to write a horror story about that, but one that also danced with almost being one of the shaggy dog stories that Loki fears wasting time on so much, while hopefully also being satisfying to read. It ends up being a mish-mash of odd comics lore and no small amount of medical thriller (prion diseases are real, and they are horrifying, and they are not overly fictionalized here, although exposure to kuru in specific is virtually impossible now for these very reasons, thank goodness), and hey, I managed to get a flashback tale of young Loki in there. I love writing those.

That said, I completely forgot (this is true and I will swear to it in a court of law) that Legion/David Haller also exists as a TV show, as part of that strangely distant X-Men universe that never touches our MCU. David's fate in this story shouldn't be taken as any sort of review of what is by all accounts a strongly made and popular show. Dan Stevens is an excellent young actor. It is a completely unintentional crossover. I was looking at the list of telepathic mutants to remind myself who was who, and realized Legion dovetailed neatly into Carter's obsessive reclamation of his faith.

Yeah, oops.

The rest is pretty general comics lore, reworked to try to make it accessible, and to underline some themes I come back to with fair regularity. I hope you enjoyed reading it - I did enjoy writing it. The Halloween-flavor fics are some of my favorites to do.

That said, I'm burrowing for a while to survive the holidays and to work on some other projects. I hope you have a great season, and I'm always up just to say hi. Have a great year - and I hope everyone enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok!


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